In an article in this newspaper, ‘Another Himalayan Blunder: Authentic Indian scientific research is disappearing’, a writer bemoans, quite rightly, the disappearance of authentic scientific research in India. While it will be grossly unfair to condemn all that comes out in scientific journals as products of dishonest practices, the fact remains that, unfortunately, the cancer of plagiarism — the culture of ‘cutting and pasting’ (which is lifting others’ research publications and getting them published as their own) — has spread far and wide in the academic community.
Those who indulge in this malpractice have no qualms about it for the simple reason that they find it a safe and profitable short-cut to glory and all that goes with it, namely, easy promotions, increased emoluments, boost in status, honoured positions in important committees and even their womenfolk riding high at the Ladies’ Clubs!
Besides, the risk of getting caught and facing the consequences is negligibly small because the referees who scrutinise the papers before they are accepted for publication in journals are unable to detect in most of the cases that the same material has appeared under somebody else’s name elsewhere. This is borne out by the fact that very few cases come to light and even if some are reported, nothing commensurate happens.
Why do academicians resort to this unethical practice?
Our present educational system is squarely to be blamed for insisting on teachers publishing a large number of ‘papers’ and for giving them invariably a disproportionately greater weightage during promotions to higher cadres. In universities and colleges, including the IITs, a person’s calibre as a teacher is assessed solely on the numerical abundance of research papers — how many? —he presents at the time of his interview for a higher post. Sadly, the candidate who happens to have one or two papers more than the other is considered a better teacher and rewarded with promotions without any regard whatsoever to the quality of the contents of those ‘papers’.
This basis for evaluating a teacher, namely, ‘the more the papers, the better the teacher’ is absolutely fallacious. It often turns out that the person who has managed to accumulate a large number of papers somehow, is a poor teacher when it comes to actually teaching (though there can be exceptions).
Conversely, there have been and there are many more examples of excellent teachers who have never bothered to decorate themselves with many research papers but are still remembered by hundreds of their students for the sheer beauty of their dedicated teaching. (My own professor at the university had only a handful of papers but was a giant of a teacher!).
It needs to be highlighted that the preparation of a research paper by itself takes a long time and still a longer time to see it in print in a reputed journal after a rigorous peer-review for acceptance. A young lecturer or a reader doesn’t find the required time for all that, since he needs to teach varied subjects for several hours per week. But he knows that if he does not keep reeling out publications, he will lag behind others in the rat-race for promotions.
So, this obsession with papers with the dictum, ‘publish or perish’ dangling above his head as the Democles’ sword, leads him to the easier option of plagiarising others’ papers. Needless to say that those sincere souls who immerse themselves in their first love, teaching, without bothering about their research papers, lose out in the mad run to higher posts but are still rewarded by the response from their students, which is what they cherish most.
It needs to be realised that in educational institutions, teachers are appointed expressly for teaching and, for doing so satisfactorily they have to constantly be in touch with the recent developments in their fields by researching. And if they have a good command of the language in order to make their students understand the subject, then that should be sufficient to reward them.
The job of publishing prolifically is best left to exclusive research institutes, centres and laboratories where no curricular teaching is involved. This is the only way to weed out plagiarism totally from academia because students are interested in learning and do not really care for the number of papers their teachers boast of.
Dr V Subramanyan Iyer is a former professor of Geology at IIT Bombay
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