Plagiarism is one of the challenges the academic institutions face in maintaining the high-quality standards of research and higher education.
This indicates the need for more efficient solutions for prevention and resolution of plagiarism and other acts of research.
In Nigeria, plagiarism could be regarded as one of the resultant negative effects of internet use in recent times. Its occurrence has gradually become rampant due to the availability of internet facilities.
However, as part of efforts to promote good research in Universities across the country and effectively curb plagiarism, the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has reiterated its commitment to digitise thesis and projects in the nation’s higher institutions.
Plagiarism, which is the act of taking the writings of another person and passing them off as one’s own has been a serious form of research misconduct in Nigeria and worldwide.
Most higher institutions all over the world are battling with the ‘plague’ of plagiarism and are working round the clock to devise means to curb the ugly trend.
The executive secretary of TETFund, Arch Sonny Echono told LEADERSHIP in an interview that all research proposals by lecturers and other scholars will be subjected to an anti-plagiarism test before attracting the funding of the agency.
He said, “That is one area that we dealt with. Immediately I came on board. The collaboration commenced before I came discussing with our institutions as part of their post COVID response to curriculum delivery publications and so on.
“We agreed that one of the veins of our educational system is the fact that we do not have a national repository of knowledge. When you graduate or you’re about to graduate, they give you projects.
“You go to do your project, they say do five copies, you submit them and you keep one to yourself. The moment you go to the park to the head of the department, keep one in the departmental, the other one in the central library, after some time you see some of them appear in the market because they don’t have space to store them.
“Each year they have thousands of students submitting four copies each and so on, that contribute to part of the problems you’re talking about. One, we don’t have these records so students don’t have access to them to learn to do their research.
“You know there is book review and is one of the areas to commence your research work. Secondly, there are no citations because it’s not available and is not visible to anybody solely in that particular school. And thirdly is what you talked about.
“Students can easily just carry and copy an entire thesis completely, just change the name and submit because there is no way of checking since it was done in the University of Maiduguri and that student is University of Ibadan now,” he said.
Echono added that the Fund has set up a committee who gave it advice on what to do, saying that it has carried out an assessment, extensive consultations and has commenced the digitization of Thesis and the creation of those repositories and attached to that digitization project program is also the checker, the anti plagiarism checker.
“So now we’re installing it in all our institutions. So we started with our own submissions, anybody who is making any submissions to TETfund for research grants, for any kind of support, or even submitting your report to all at the end of the sponsorship will give for masters and PhDs. We’ll run it through to see if it is worth it.
“If you want us to publish your book for you we do that. Now the previous practice, where we use international checkers that have proved not to be useful locally because a lot of our documents are not digitized so they’re not even among the system checking.
“You’re only checking them with what other people have published around the world, not our logo, but now that we are digitizing our own and putting it out there we are closing the seals and that is ongoing. They are coming to brief me next week on the earlier stage when the template has now been adopted by all the institutions,” he added.
Speaking further, the TETFund boss expressed its commitment to pursue the completion of the National Library of Nigeria to achieve its mission.
“The National Library, it’s a commitment that we made and as I said previously, the funds have been made available. We are aware that there are some contractual issues agreeing on the revised estimated cost, contractor accepting and the time between when the review was done and what has happened.
“So the letter of that is causing the delay, coming to an agreement, I am aware at some point the memo was put before the Federal executive council because of the magnitude of the approval that was required FEC need to approve.
“So once all that is done, the money is waiting so we disburse it because we believe a national library is central to our aspirations as a country willing to partake in the knowledge economy,” he said.
It would be recalled that the Committee of Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian Universities had already developed the EagleScan Plagiarism Detection Software to fight against plagiarism and ensure the promotion of originality in academic research.
EPDS was developed in conjunction with directors of ICT of six Nigerian universities, and was now fully ready for adoption in all tertiary institutions in the country.
The equipment is an inventive move to improve the internal workings of the university system.
