Differences in Student's Viewpoints about Effective Factors on Plagiarism According to their Gender and Academic Disciplines

Recently, one of the main factors in prohibiting academic development and writing scientific articles is the phenomena of plagiarism. The main purpose of this article is to investigate the role of demographic factors on the plagiarism from the viewpoints of Isfahan University’s students. The research method was descriptive and correlation one. For gathering information, self made questionnaire was used. 370 students were randomly selected among different disciplines proportionate to the whole students of each Isfahan University’s disciplines in academic year 1388-1389. Data were analyzed by using independent t-test and one way variance analysis (ANOVA). Findings of this study indicated that there were significant relationship between students’ genders, disciplines and some of the realized effective factors for students’ plagiarism such as (Pressure, students’ scores, professors’ weak reaction towards plagiarism, rules and regulations for plagiarism in the university, students’ prior knowledge, access to information and communication technologies such as Internet, previous training, cultural and ethical values). The suggested plagiarism preventative strategies are: increasing the students’ self efficacy and self confidence in writing academic paper, reducing the environmental pressures and studen يts’ tasks workloads, establishing systematic rules and regulation for punishing plagiarizers in the university level and society, and making changes in the methods for assessing students’ academic achievements.