Ethical Behavior in Relation to the Scholarly Community

Abstract

The action of using someone else’s production, ideas, or research without acknowledging the source and then claiming credit for them is known as plagiarism. Plagiarism is in principle a moral offense; it is not always an illegal action but certainly is an ethical complex case. Copying without permission or stealing someone else’s work violates the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in professional scientific research. Science may be somewhat more prone to plagiarism in that scholars exchange ideas and proposals more frequently than artists, for example. Workshops, scientific meetings, and round tables are places where primitive and preliminary researches are presented and discussed before their official presentation. This chapter discusses plagiarism and self plagiarism and tries to point out the role of the scientific community toward this kind of scientific misconduct.