Exploring Plagiarism Policy Statements on Iranian University and Higher Education Institute Websites

Plagiarism has been receiving an unprecedented attention in recent years, especially among the academia. Despite the efforts of universities and university professors to find ways to prevent students from the academic misconduct, the problem persists. In the opinion of many researchers this issue has even increased. The main purpose of this article is to help Iranian universities combat the epidemic of plagiarism. In other words, it strives to heighten the universities’ awareness of the importance of having a clear policy on plagiarism- especially on their websites. To achieve this goal and introduce practical and research-based solutions, the researcher examined website contents of 133 universities and educational institutes accredited by Iran’s Ministry of Science, Research and Technology to find out if they contain any policy statements on plagiarism. The results indicated an absence of content relevant to the concept from the majority of the websites, suggesting that in most Iranian universities students may be deprived of an adequate education on avoiding plagiarism and on the significance of academic honesty for that matter. This study argues that to effectively tackle the issue of plagiarism, it is absolutely necessary that the educational institutions not take students’ familiarity with the concept and of ways to avoid it for granted. They need to realize that plagiarism is a critical issue which requires major attention as well as a coherent and comprehensive educative approach to deal with.