Tolerance to plagiarism in the Russian scientific community

Abstract

During last decade Russian research is characterized, on the one hand, by a rather high level of academic dishonesty, and on the other, by the activity of some scientific community to fight academic misconduct, which should lead to the adjustment of the norms on the admissibility of plagiarism or other forms of violation of academic ethics. However, a sufficiently large part of the academic community is not only tolerant to plagiarism, but also demonstrates a protest reaction on the establishment of obvious norms on the unacceptability of plagiarism. We analyzed the texts of the decisions of dissertation councils on the requests for with drawal of academic degree and identified the main methods of legitimizing plagiarism in the scientific community. Their analysis will allow us to conclude that the concept of plagiarism in the Russian scientific community is quite vague and that the part of the scientific community that justifies plagiarism is conservative enough from outside influence, or that it itself takes part in the dissertation business and is able to use the most absurd explanations to justify plagiarism.