PhD Students in India must now learn ethics and publication errors. They will now learn about Plagiarism and all the research ethics.
UGC sent a circular letter to all higher education institutions affiliated to it on Thursday said it had approved a two-credit course on ethics and publication errors. Entitled Research and Publication Ethics (RPE), 30 hours should be made mandatory for all PhD students for pre-registration course work at universities.
The idea is to improve the quality of research papers by teaching students how to go about it at the beginning of their PhD – of teaching them how to research a topic, the best practices to adopt, and how to avoid manipulation and plagiarism.
“The quality of research papers produced in India was not good, and we are aware of it. There were complaints of plagiarism as well, which is why we now want to teach students ethics publication so the criticism can be avoided, “said UGC secretary Rajnish Jain
Problem
This is one of many ways in which the government wants to improve the quality of the PhD in India. In July, a UGC committee has suggested several ways in which the quality of research can be improved. It also comes with a list of the recognized journal, called CARE list, and suggested that only those research papers in the list of journals CARE should be used for academic purposes.
The report also said that India had contributed 35 per cent of all articles published in the journal false.
The report added that the plagiarism and manipulation of data are significant problems.
Syllabus
The syllabus will include ethics and philosophy and scientific behaviour, which will teach students about intellectual honesty, fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism.
An open-access publishing module will teach them how to use resources such as open data and how to interpret it in the right way.
To teach about the error, students will be given examples of fraud complaints from India and abroad and made aware of copyright issues. The use of tools such as Turnitin plagiarism will also be taught.
PhD Student response
Deeksha Bhatheja, which has been registered for a PhD at Panjab University in Chandigarh, calling it “a very good step.”
“As part of the UGC regulations, all students are required to pre-PhD work program. If we taught the ethics of publication as part of the course, it was a good move. Most students do not know what sources to use for their research and how to avoid plagiarism and maintain the checks and balances the other. Basic knowledge of all of this is necessary. “
Mamta Tripathy, who in the last year of his PhD at the University of Delhi, agrees.
“When I started pursuing my PhD, I had to go-to guide for everything, even the basics such as the source and indexing. But if PhD Students are taught the basics first, the research process will be smooth, “he said.
Bikramaditya Kumar Choudhary, who teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of Social Sciences and has PhD scholars working under him, also sees this as a positive step.
“Plagiarism and unethical practices in India so rampant even top academics are not aware of these. In such a scenario, if the UGC is bringing such changes to the policy level to teach students about ethics, it is a welcome step for everybody, “said Choudhary.
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