A Presentation on Falsification, Fabrication and Plagiarism in
The Discipline of Literature and Literary Studies
Introduction
In the face of the pressures of academia to make worthwhile and rapid knowledge
contributions in their disciplines and others, academics, scholars and students are usually
compelled to resort to less appropriate measures to keep up with the demands of the ‘publish or
perish’ culture. This resort is either fueled by individual endeavours and moral leanings, or
unofficially endorsed by turbid and dubious research culture in institutions. The various
committees on research integrity in academia like the European Code of Conduct for Research
Integrity, the US Committee on Assessing Integrity and the US Office of Research Integrity
(ORI) have outlined a series of breaches in research conduct, but one of the most serious among
them is the FFP misconduct, otherwise known as Fabrication, Falsification and Plagiarism.
Fabrication is generally understood as the construction and sharing of data, procedures
and results which either do not exist or are far from the actual observed truth. It is a serious
misconduct in academia and is usually adopted by highly pressurised individuals who are
desperate to publish or who possess a low measure of ethics.
Falsification, on the other hand, is the manipulation of data, methods of research conduct
and values of results such that the final result is in congruent agreement with the original
hypothesis of the research topic.
Plagiarism is the claim of information and published data as one’s own when they have
actually either been borrowed or stolen. This happens through the deprivation of the accordance
of due credit to the individual or group of individuals to whom the idea or concept originally
belongs and who had previously published them. Publishing a certain work which was
previously published in another language also qualifies as plagiarism.
Causes of FFP
The expected end goal of most research endeavours is publication. In academic spaces,
publications determine placement, job security, promotions, increments and more. Publications
decide the success or ruin of an academic. Therefore, one is pressured to actively publish lest he
perishes, career and name devoid of any ounce of success or recognition. This external pressure
and expectation placed on academics to publish, supplemented by unchecked institutional
malpractices and lobbies such as predatory publishers which facilitate research and publication
misconduct, drive, protect and encourage an academic to resort to FFP misconduct. An
individual’s moral grounding also plays a role in research and publication misconduct. In the
discipline of literary studies, a vague grasp of the boundary separating literary influence and
plagiarism also contributes to the spike in cases of publication misconduct. The data in literary
studies, which consists of primary texts and secondary sources, is open to endless
reinterpretation, which makes it easier to distort certain contextual evidence to force a text to fit a
specific hypothesis, which is a form of falsification. In certain cases, a publication is also passed
off as novel or avant-garde, when in reality, it had already been published in a different
language.