Implementing plagiarism awareness workshop to nursing faculty members, Damanhour University

Abstract

Background and objective: Plagiarism is defined as intentionally and without agreement presenting someone else’s ideas or words, as one’s own work. Plagiarism by academics occurs due to the growing pressure to publish research, in addition to increasing burden to publish in high-impact top-tier journals. The present study aims to implement a plagiarism awareness workshop to Nursing Faculty members to introduce the plagiarism concept as one of research misconducts and to compare between knowledge of Nursing faculty member pre and immediately post workshop.

Methods: The study was conducted at Faculty of Nursing, Damanhour University. Subjects: The study subject included 51 working full time nursing faculty members who agreed to participate in the workshop. Study instrument: the researchers had developed a self-administered questionnaire which was designed to assess the nursing faculty member’s perceptions of plagiarism.

Results: The current study results showed that 55% of participants have fair knowledge about plagiarism as compared to 11.7% whom knowledge level is poor. Also, it was found that the highest percentage of participants (96.1%) was among those who refused plagiarism post workshop with a significant difference (p = .001) between responses pre and post workshop. Moreover, the highest median of change (19.23) was among age group 40-50, while the lowest median (3.23) was recorded for the age group 30- with a significant difference between groups (p = .002). Regarding the participants’ titles, the highest median (20.69) was among assistant professor while the lowest median (-1.72) was among clinical instructor with a significant difference recorded (p = .050).

Conclusions: The current study findings concluded significant positive changes in the level of knowledge of the participants after implementation of workshop.