Patterns of AIgiarism and Plagiarism in Sci-Tech Communication: Implications for Academic Integrity

Academic integrity promotes the principles of honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility in scholarship, but is increasingly challenged by both traditional forms of plagiarism and evolving forms such as AI-giarism or AI-assisted plagiarism. A corpus of 37 scientific papers was examined using Turnitin, with the aim of identifying the patterns of plagiarism and AI usage. From the findings, the commonest forms of plagiarism practiced were mosaic, verbatim plagiarism and omission of quotations. Plagiarism occurred mostly across sections of the paper and in the introduction and literature review sections. The same pattern was observed with regard to AI-generated content in the sections. An inverse relationship was observed between AI-generated papers and the papers with high similarity indexes. It was concluded that AI has become a tool to reduce incidences of plagiarism, and that plagiarism and AIgiarism practices are mostly deliberate. Also, there is the need to identify the blurred line between the use of AI as an assistive tool, and its misuse as a primary knowledge creator. Recommendations suggested include targeted academic training on ethical writing practices, and a re-engineering of existing plagiarism detection tools and methods, to better capture subtle and evolving forms of academic misconduct.