Plagiarism is the use of another scholar's ideas or words without proper
accreditation. It occurs mostly due to the lack of awareness and poor research
skills. The current study was undertaken to investigate the awareness about
plagiarism among the academic staff at the South Valley University (SVU), its
causes and the policy that should be taken by the SVU against plagiarism
practices. The stratified random sampling method was used to investigate the
awareness of academic staff at SVU about different types of plagiarism.
Academic staff (157) from different faculties at SVU were surveyed through an
online questionnaire. The Vice President of SVU for the academic affair and
postgraduate research was interviewed to ensure the presence of policy to deal
with plagiarism cases. The findings revealed that only about 60% of the academic
staff at the SVU were aware about plagiarism with varying levels of awareness of
different types of plagiarism among. Most of the staff was aware of complete
plagiarism (99.4%), followed by misleading attribution (82.2%), verbatim (79%),
repetitive research (67.5%), paraphrasing (66.9%), duplication (63.1%),
secondary source (49%), invalid source (47.8%), unethical collaboration (33.1%)
and replication (17.8%). The study revealed some causes of plagiarism such as
are poor awareness, lack of writing skills and absence of definite policy of
punishment on plagiarized researchers. The study reported that there is no
authorized policy to deal with plagiarizers at SVU. The author recommends
training of the staff of SVU to promote awareness about the different types of
plagiarism and its implications, improving their writing skills and applying a
definite policy against proven cases of plagiarism. Further focused studies are
required to investigate the awareness of academic staff about plagiarism in other
Egyptian Universities and to test strategies to prevent it.