The initial goal of our survey was to explore biomedical professionals' general perceptions in Europe and China, as well as the similarities and contrasts between the two regions14. Like others27–29, we focused on the similarities and differences on perceptions of plagiarism between the Western World and the Eastern World, and did not address potential disparities within Europe. However, it was also apparent that the responses from European respondents exhibited geographical heterogeneity. Fortunately, the data we gathered allowed for more in-depth research into perceptions of plagiarism across Europe. The present subsequent analysis provides additional novel empirical evidence about commonalities and disparities in the views held by biomedical researchers with regard to plagiarism.
Here, we did not repeat association analysis because it was covered in the 2020 article14. The purpose of the present analysis was to compare and contrast responses in three European regions: the Nordic countries, southern Europe, and northwestern Europe.
Not unexpectedly, the main conclusions of the subsequent analysis are very comparable to what we found in our 2020 article14. For example, in general, the perceived harm of plagiarism lies between that caused by data falsification and inappropriate authorship, multiple submission. Furthermore, the existence of intent was deemed more relevant than the part or length of the copied text in identifying a plagiarism act. A similar tendency was also observed in the present study about perceptions of specific practices: most respondents in the three European regions correctly identified the blatant plagiarism practices, but they identified the subtle ones less correctly. Nonetheless, even the most blatant forms of plagiarism, such as appropriation of another's text or image without PROPER attribution, which are clearly classified as plagiarism in many widely accepted guidelines30–32, were not identified by all of the respondents.
Nevertheless, the proportions of respondents who did not identify some specific practices as plagiarism varied across three geographical regions within Europe. In other words, the comparison of the three regions reveals some intra-European divergent perspectives on plagiarism, despite showing broadly similar response patterns.
In summary, among the three European regions, Nordic respondents were the most inclined to recognize dubious practices as plagiarism. The southern respondents were the most sensitive to recycling of one’s previously rejected research proposal but least to plagiarism of image and online source. The comparisons also revealed that northwestern respondents were more sensitive to common types of plagiarism than their southern counterparts.
Earlier studies on plagiarism and research misconduct were generally conducted by researchers from English-speaking countries7,8,33–36, and cultural factors were primarily focused on Western and Asian countries34,37. Some recent research has begun to focus on intra-European differences, and distinctions have been identified. The project IPPHEAE, whose conclusions have been documented in scientific articles and reports37–42, is one of the most significant projects.
The IPPHEAE project investigated higher education institutions (including students and staff) in 27 countries across Europe to see how they dealt with plagiarism and academic misconduct. Despite limited response rates in a few nations, the project yielded a wealth of data for cross-sectional comparison, even taking into account potential limitations in terms of representativeness.
When presenting the outcomes of the IPPHEAE project, Glendinning37 noted “great variability in understanding what constitutes plagiarism and what was deemed acceptable academic practice” and pointed out that “the lack of consensus over what constitutes plagiarism is perhaps one of the major barriers to academic integrity across the EU.”
Although it is a country-based research project, IPPHEAE revealed a general trend: the Nordic respondents (especially those in Finland and Sweden) were more likely to identify the two specific practices [(a) 40% word-for-word copied work with no quotations, (d) 40% copied work, with some words changed with no quotations, references or in text citations.] as plagiarism than their counterparts in northwestern Europe (especially those in France, Germany, and the Netherlands), while the latter were more likely than their counterparts in southern Europe (quantitative data is available from Spain and unavailable from Italy), which was generally consistent with their reported training experience40,41,43–46.
Foltýnek and Čech38 observed significant disparities in attitudes toward plagiarism between western and post-communist countries based on the answers of students and teachers in six European countries: Bulgaria, Great Britain, Czech Republic, Poland, Cyprus and Lithuania (with the Czech Republic included in the group of western countries).
A few more studies, in addition to IPPHEAE, also looked into perceptions of plagiarism across Europe, with or without providing detailed data.
Kayaoğlu et al. examined students' perceptions of plagiarism in three countries: Turkey, Germany, and Georgia, and discovered that German students were more sensitive to plagiarism and better at detecting it9. The disparity, according to Kayaoğlu et al.9, is due to Turkey's "textbook-based" teaching strategy and exam-driven education system, as well as Georgia's similar cultural learning tradition with Asia.
Pupovac et al. studied four European nations and discovered that students in Bulgaria and Croatia were more tolerant of exam cheating than their counterparts in the UK47. They also believe that their findings support Magnus’ conclusion48 that tolerance for academic misbehavior was greater in post-communist countries. When given an example of plagiarism (“40% of student’s submission copied without any quotation or reference”), respondents from the Czech Republic, the UK, Poland, and Cyprus were more successful in identifying it as plagiarism, whereas Lithuanian and Bulgarian respondents were more lenient, especially if some words were changed.
In comparison to their northwestern counterparts, the Nordic respondents had lower degree of self-doubt of their research practices. Indeed, the Nordic respondents did identify the most plagiarism practices compared to their counterparts in the other two regions. But the fact that scientists’ self-confidence was not always positively associated to their knowledge was discovered in our study49. Similarly, the IPPHEAE project discovered that self-confidence was not necessarily favorably correlated with perceptions or training of plagiarism41,43,45. Yaniv et al.50 reported a dissociation between confidence and accuracy, whereby people tend to have confidence in consensus, even it is less accurate. As a consequence, it is possible that the respondents who reported to be confident with their research practices had experienced more consensus, regardless of how correct it was, on plagiarism definitions and practices. Besides, education and training experiences on the topic of plagiarism might lead those scientific researchers to assume that they had already developed a good understanding of it.
Enlightenment by cultural differences across Europe
It is a crucial step to realize the existence of intra-European differences on perceptions of plagiarism, and to understand what underlies the differences. An examination of the social-cultural similarities and differences across the three European areas (and the countries involved) could provide useful insights. Hereby we have made an initial endeavor to interpret our findings with available studies on European cultures. However, due to the limited data and different research subjects, the interpretation might not be that strong.
Waehning et al.16 compared four European countries - Great Britain, Germany, France, and Spain - regarding four cultural value dimensions using data from the World Values Survey (WVS). We suggest that their two dimensions, “openness to change” and “conservation”, might be related to some of the findings in our survey.
“Openness to change” is one of the cultural value dimensions, and it includes the values “stimulations” and “self-direction”, as well as the tendency to “do things their own way”16. It is possible that people who score higher on this dimension are more confident in their own actions and are less likely to doubt about plagiarism practices. Another dimension, “conservation”, involves the tendency to “behave ‘properly’”, choose to live in secure surroundings and avoid anything that might be risky or dangerous16. It is plausible that people who score higher on this dimension are more sensitive to (seemingly) inappropriate behaviors and are more prone to interpret specific ambiguous behaviors of plagiarism. For both of the two dimensions, in the Waehning et al. survey16, Great Britain had the highest mean scores, followed by Spain, France, and Germany. We believe that this ranking might also be reflective of researchers’ self-confidence in their own research practices and researchers’ judgments of dubious practices.
In our analysis, we found that Nordic respondents (in Denmark, Finland and Sweden) were more self-confident than their northwestern counterparts (in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK), and that southern respondents (in Italy and Spain) were more sensitive to some undefined practices, such as recycling of one’s previously rejected research proposal, than their Nordic and northwestern counterparts. Unfortunately, our comparison, which is region-based, cannot allow for further verifications. It would be worth studying to see whether detailed investigations at the level of individual countries could generate consistent results.
Comparison with China
In spite of the fact that we had already compared the European responses and Chinese responses in our original article14, it was also of interest to compare the response pattern of each European region with that found for China. However, the comparisons of responses to each question, did not lead to a clear conclusion. On the whole, China did not appear to be consistently more similar or different from one of the European regions (Additional File 5-1, 5-2, 5-3).
More specifically, when we checked the percentages of respondents selecting the specific option (without statistical analysis), discrepancy between Europe and China can sometimes be observed as in our previous work14: for example, compared to the three European regions, the Chinese respondents were more likely to indicate paid or unpaid ghostwriting (statement 20a, 20b) as plagiarism and less likely to perceive the intention as an important factor in determining a plagiarism practice (question 15c). Besides, less discrepancy between Europe and China was noticed in other cases, where the percentage of respondents identifying the practice as plagiarism in China ranked in the middle among the four regions (i.e., north Europe, southern Europe, northwestern Europe and China), such as misappropriation of images and ideas (statement 17d, 17e).
It is worth mentioning that, as in the last work, the main goal of our comparative analysis was to help understand different research behaviors, rather than making judgements of researchers’ perceptions of plagiarism.
With increasing globalization of scientific communications, as in many other areas nowadays, researchers with different cultures and backgrounds are very likely to face the same judgement criteria of research practices. We suggest that understanding the differences is critical for understanding practical differences and addressing plagiarism more effectively.