Scholars alert: Osmania University theses to undergo plagiarism check

Hyderabad: With an aim to strengthen the sanctity of doctoral research, Osmania University has made checks for plagiarism mandatory for PhD theses that are submitted for evaluation.

The university has purchased Turnitin software at a cost of Rs 7.61 lakh per year, and has appointed Dr A.S. Chakravarthy, assistant professor, as coordinator, anti-plagiarism software.

The Turnitin software, which has been found to be extremely rigorous in checking duplication and copying, accepts 400 pages of material or 40 Mb file size at a time.

The coordinator plans to undertake an awareness programme for faculty members and research scholars to apprise them of the software and the awaiting pitfalls if researchers ever plagiarise.

Dr Chakravarthy will be heading administration, while a maximum of 250 faculty members, including heads of departments, chairpersons of boards of studies and deans, etc will be given access to Turnitin. Research scholars will have to submit a soft copy to the concerned supervisor, who is expected to run the software and issue a system-generated report to be forwarded to the coordinator.

If the similarity index is below 25 per cent, the coordinator will issue a clearance for submission. 

If the index exceeds 25 percent, the scholar will be given the option to edit and rewrite portions of the thesis. This modification would be allowed only before final certification by the coordinator.

The scholars are required to pay user charges of Rs 500 per thesis. Given that around 1,000 theses are submitted annually at Osmania University, this amount will go a considerable way towards meeting the operational costs of the software. 

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