This research was born out of a large part of the international university community’s concern and ignorance about a phenomenon that is spreading ever more widely through society – plagiarism. In the international context, there are authors who argue for a difference in culture and values in the way governments, students, and teachers confront this phenomenon (Cahyono, 2009; Granitz & Loewy, 2007; Guangwei Hu, 2011; Heckler & Forde, 2015), while others see the increase in plagiarism to coincide with the use of the Internet but also pointing out that there are automatic tools which can be used to correct problems of academic integrity (Mphahlele & McKenna, 2019; Roe & Perkins, 2022). Another topic of interest is that of the regulations and strategies concerning plagiarism applied by institutions in different countries (Carroll, 2005; Devlin, 2003; University of Hull, 2018), or the importance of appropriate training and instruction as an effective tool to combat it (Lampert, 2008; Strittmatter & Bratton, 2014).

In Spain, this is reflected in the growth in recent years of the number of studies of plagiarism in the country’s universities and the coincidence of this growth in the international context. Thus, some studies have been aimed at determining the different definitions and types of plagiarism (Alonso Arévalo, 2017; Boillos Pereira, 2020; Sarmiento Campos et al., 2022) or the external and internal factors that influence this practice (Cebrián-Robles et al., 2018; Hernández-Ruiz, 2016; Sureda et al., 2009, 2013). Others have looked at the institutional perspective and the policies and regulations in this regard (Gómez Espinosa et al., 2021). Recent studies reflect the interest in the rise of cyberplagiarism (Cebrián-Robles et al., 2018; Comas et al., 2011; Comas-Forgas et al., 2021), a phenomenon which according to Olivia-Dumitrina et al. (2019) “can be defined as the appropriation of information in any format (text, images, video, etc.) from the Internet and its use as one’s own without any reference to its author”. Finally, there has been recognized the importance of adequate instruction (Gómez Espinosa et al., 2016; Muñoz-Cantero & Espiñeira-Bellón, 2020; Sureda et al., 2009) and collaboration between different agents (Gil Cano et al., 2017). Many repercussions have been addressed: academic, such as disciplinary sanctions; economic, such as avoiding the fair remuneration of authors, and the expense or profitability of anti-plagiarism tools; ethical, such as malpractice with respect to the values of university ethics; legal, such as respecting intellectual property and copyright laws and other national or university legislation and regulations; and social, such as the university’s loss of prestige within society, or the contribution to a new culture where other values prevail (Abad-García, 2018; Alonso Arévalo, 2017; Codina, 2020; Duarte-Hueros et al., 2016; Egaña, 2012; Fernández Ramos, 2017; González-Teruel, 2022; Martínez Sala et al., 2019; Temiño, 2022). There has as yet been no holistic study of all these repercussions in the international and national context. Hence the importance of the present research study, despite its being exploratory in nature.

A detailed analysis of the institutional websites of Spain’s universities provided the keys to how they tackle this issue. Some universities such as Cantabria, Huelva, Navarra, or Cartagena have what they call Declarations of Honesty,¹ which are standard forms that students have to fill in at the time of turning in any academic work, in which they declare that their work is unpublished, that they have not used other materials as their own, that the results of others have been clearly identified, and that the sources used have been correctly cited. Some universities include the intellectual protection of the authorship of academic works in their statutes and have regulations for the evaluation of student performance in which specific reference is made to plagiarism. An example is the University of Alcalá.² Academic plagiarism is also addressed on the websites of university library services offering information and learning, as is the case of the universities of Alicante with a comprehensive theoretical content on plagiarism, of Barcelona whose Learning and Research Resources Centre (CRAI) offers advice for instructors and for students about detecting plagiarism in academic papers, of Carlos III which specializes in Master’s study resources, and of Extremadura with guides about using Urkund.³ In general, these resources are in the form of guides or courses, and structure their practical content around the resolution of cases, assumptions, and examples, and their theoretical content around the concept, its definition, influencing factors, legislation and regulations, and citation and bibliographic reference system. Spain’s universities also provide anti-plagiarism tools and information about their use.

To carry out the present project, we considered the characteristics of the University of Extremadura regarding the tools it has to combat plagiarism, in particular, the guides available at the university library, the Urkund anti-plagiarism system, and documents related to the evaluation of end-of-studies projects in which there appears an item related to the evaluators’ review of the originality of papers and the regulations of the Faculty of Documentation and Communication Sciences about preparing end-of-studies projects, and a specific guide to preparing these projects.⁴ In addition, the competencies taught in each of the Degrees studied were analysed to check whether any aspects related to the issue of plagiarism appeared in them directly or indirectly. The concept of competency had gained strength from the process of adaptation of university degrees to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). A competency is defined as a set of skills, practices, knowledge, and values that complete a person’s learning, allowing them to act appropriately in a given context and adapt to continuous changes in the labour and professional market (Tejada & Tobon, 2006). Competencies may be basic, specific to the degree, and cross-cutting or generic. The cross-cutting competencies in this case are essential because they represent the social, communicative, ethical, and cognitive dimension that allows true adaptation to the profession’s continuous changes. As an example, a list of competencies of this type can be found in the document designed for the Information and Documentation degree in Spain (Libro Blanco, 2004), in which the referent for specific competencies was taken to be the Euroguide LIS, and that for cross-cutting competencies the Tuning project.

Finally, the characteristics of the hybrid and virtual teaching system implemented for the different degree courses were taken into account. This system is based on the use of the Moodle platform and the incorporation of continuous evaluation in accordance with the Bologna precept, founded on the practices or assignments that the students have to hand in progressively within the deadlines established throughout the year as planned by each instructor.

Given these premises, the present research attempts to respond to the following questions: 1) Do the students and faculty of the Faculty of Documentation and Communication Sciences at the University of Extremadura know what academic plagiarism is, how it is defined, and what consequences of diverse nature does committing plagiarism entail? 2) Do the university degrees taught at the said Centre grant academic plagiarism the necessary importance to be included among their cross-cutting competencies? 3) Is it necessary for the University of Extremadura to hold Seminars or Conferences to convey the importance of plagiarism in the academic context?

To answer these questions, which are extrapolatable to other universities, degrees, and geographical areas, and taking as referent a recent teaching innovation project at the Centre focused on the repercussions of plagiarism in university degree courses in the virtual context and their relationship with the cross-cutting competencies of those degrees, an investigation was carried out with three objectives: (1) to analyse the knowledge that students and instructors have about plagiarism and its repercussions, in particular, their understanding of the relevant definitions and awareness of the consequences; (2) to study the cross-cutting competencies of the University Degrees involved and their relationship with plagiarism to verify the importance with which the University and its teaching staff address it; and (3) to implement specific learning about university plagiarism and its repercussions in order to disseminate and reinforce the importance of plagiarism in the academic environment.

The answers to the questions posed and the attainment of the objectives set represent an impulse given to Information-Sciences-related university studies in Spain since, although there has been such research carried out in other fields, we have not located any in this discipline that covers conjointly so many aspects of plagiarism (academic, economic, legal, ethical, and social) as well as its reflection in the cross-cutting competencies of the degrees.

The research was carried out during the 2021–2022 academic year, framed in the Faculty of Documentation and Communication Sciences of the University of Extremadura, specifically, in the Bachelor’s degrees in Information and Documentation (INDO), in Audiovisual Communication (CAV), and in Journalism (PER), and in the Master’s degree in Social Network Information Management and Digital Products on the Internet (GIRS). Also included were the students of the UEx’s PhD program in Information and Communication (DOCTOR-INCO) and the teaching staff of the Teaching Innovation Group (GID) VIRTUALesMÁS (PDI-GID).

For the first two objectives, and based on all the information analysed, a questionnaire was designed divided into two Blocks: Block I – Academic plagiarism and its repercussions, with 17 general items (item number 2 includes 8 options) about plagiarism and its academic, economic, legal, ethical, or social repercussions, and Block II – Plagiarism and its relationship with cross-cutting competencies, with 8 items (item number 4 includes 5 options) focused on the need to incorporate the topic into the subjects of the university degree courses (Table 1). As just noted, the design of the questionnaire was based on the relevance of the information collected and analysed in the introduction and bibliographic review part of this research. In addition, it was validated by 5 professors and researchers experts in the field (from the University of Extremadura and the University of Valencia) who were selected taking into account the impact factor associated with their publications.

In both blocks, the information collected came from the voluntary participation of 267 anonymous students (85 of CAV, 54 of INDO, 111 of PER, 7 of GIRS, and 10 of DOCTOR-INCO) and the 13 instructors of the Innovation Group (PDI-GID). The selection of the sample of students took into account the following two criteria: 1) that they were officially enrolled in the 2021–2022 academic year in the different courses of the Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees or in the Doctoral Program of the degrees analysed, and 2) that, in order to comply with the ethical considerations of informed consent, after being informed in the face-to-face and virtual classrooms about its scope, they would like to voluntarily participate in the research. Furthermore, the participants’ confidentiality was achieved with the anonymity of the questionnaires and their subsequent coding.

With regard to the overall sample size, it represents 45.56% of the total population (267 out of 586 according to the official data provided by the Centre’s Secretariat). This can be considered an appropriate size, although it varied among the degrees analysed (30.80% CAV, 54.55% INDO, 86.05% PER, 19.44% GIRS, 21.74% DOCTOR-INCO), so that care must be taken in generalizing the segregated findings.

All the participants scored their degree of knowledge of or agreement with the questions on a Likert scale from 0 to 3 (0 none; 1 minimum; 2 medium; 3 maximum). Such a 4-point Likert scale has also been used in other studies, for example those of Alamo et al. (2019), Blanco-Nistral et al. (2021), and Ayu et al. (2023). Simple descriptive statistics were applied for the analysis of the results (using free spreadsheets). Given the quasi-experimental exploratory nature of the research, other types of statistics (e.g., inferential) were not considered.

For the third objective, to reinforce the importance that plagiarism should have on the academic environment, a Seminar was held entitled “How to deal with university plagiarism: Are we prepared to take on its consequences?” in which two experts in plagiarism from the University of Valencia (Spain) intervened. As mentioned above, these experts had been selected on the basis of the impact of their publications. They took part in the questionnaire’s validation as well as participating as speakers in the Seminar. The Seminar was attended by 64 people.

This section presents the results referring to the first two objectives grouped into the two Blocks mentioned in Methods, followed by the results concerning the third objective.

The students of the Bachelor’s degrees at the University of Extremadura and the instructors who were part of this teaching research project said that they know what plagiarism is and that they consider it to be important. This positive attitude towards the importance given to “not committing plagiarism” (question I.10, with a mean of 2.87 out of 3) is corroborated in the study of Enamudu and Akonedo (2021) who analysed a sample of 342 students from the Faculty of Education of the University of Ibadan (Nigeria), and obtained a greater proportion of students with a positive attitude to “not committing plagiarism” than with a negative attitude (although with the difference not being very pronounced), and a significant weak positive relationship being visible between the students’ academic motivation and their attitude towards plagiarism.

The students who gave more importance to not committing plagiarism corresponded to the last levels (Master’s and PhD, with 3 out of 3), and were in fact those most prepared by the instructors due to the development of the end-of-studies projects and doctoral theses), and the successive corrections they had undergone by the tutors and directors. In addition, in our Master’s virtual space, the students have a selection of resources about plagiarism, citation systems, and bibliographic references, and take a subject with specific content about intellectual property. The fact of the Master’s students not plagiarizing, i.e., their awareness of the use of sources of information, the provenance of ideas, and the orderly presentation of content that relates it to the underlying theories, has also been found in other studies such as that of Cuevas Salvador (2022).

The instructors also say they know and give importance to not committing plagiarism in their twofold role of teaching and research (with a mean of 3 out of 3). However, it must be said that the most subtle forms of plagiarism were less known to them (resubmitting a work used previously, and not recognizing other collaborators or co-authors), basically related to the conditions of publication in scientific journals. According to Hernández-Ruiz (2016), the commonest malpractices by researchers are the non-submission of unpublished papers, submission to various journals simultaneously, and the absence of permission to reproduce material subject to copyright.

Although all the groups said they knew what plagiarism is, the low averages the responses presented about its repercussions show that this knowledge is relative. They were unaware of the economic repercussions in terms of the expense of obtaining an anti-plagiarism tool for institutional use, as well as the economic upheaval that it can mean to the authors with respect to their remuneration for copyrights. This is linked to the ignorance about the legal repercussions in all its aspects, perhaps to a lesser extent in the Master’s and PhD students, whereas the Bachelor’s degree students learn them as they pass the different years. In general, all the groups are more aware of the ethical repercussions (question I.6, with a mean of 2.03 out of 3) than the legal (question I.5, with 1.30 out of 3). Most studies on plagiarism focus on the importance of the ethical dimension and are based on ethical behaviour and values. Granitz and Loewy (2007) and Strittmatter and Bratton (2014) go into depth into ethical behaviour towards plagiarism from the perspective of different ethical theories. However, in 1989 the study by Cohen and Crornwell (1989) had already noted the importance of establishing a difference between the legal and the ethical in university students’ learning about plagiarism and behaviour towards it, which Temiño (2022) continues to defend today. The general ignorance about the legal repercussions that the different groups of this study showed themselves to have is related to the low average of the question I.8 “Do you know of any general or specific university regulations on plagiarism?”. This should serve to encourage greater diffusion and instruction of the existing anti-plagiarism regulations of the University and the general laws that refer to this matter. Examples are the University Student’s Statute of 2010 which specifies offences related to intellectual property as part of the rights and duties of the student and speaks of the recognition of the authorship of works elaborated during the academic period, or the University Coexistence Law of 2022 which considers plagiarizing a work or committing fraud in the elaboration of an academic end-of-studies project or doctoral thesis to be a very serious offence, with sanctions ranging from expulsion to the loss of matriculation fees. Egaña (2012) points out another interesting aspect that leads students to not wanting to use citations in their academic papers. This is the concept of originality prevailing in today’s culture whose social effect lies in not recognizing creation based on the ideas of others. This is a mistake according to Codina (2020), who argues that no scientific or academic work can be totally original because it always has to start from the ideas of others, and that there is no contradiction between this and not committing plagiarism.

In general, students are more familiar with and recognize with greater ease the types of plagiarism related to citation systems and the use of bibliographical references (as shown for example by question I.2.1 Reproducing a text in a work without citing the author, with means between 90% and 67.63%), leaving aside such issues as recognizing collaborators and co-authors, paraphrasing a text, or resubmitting a work used previously (this last being question I.2.6 scoring between 57% and 31.16%). Self-plagiarism is a recurring unknown typology, as is demonstrated in the work carried out by Cebrián-Robles et al. (2018) on students of five Spanish universities. A consensus among authors who research into plagiarism is in differentiating intentional plagiarism from unconscious plagiarism. Boillos Pereira (2020) establishes a taxonomy of unconscious plagiarism based on a study of first-year undergraduates in Education at the Basque Country University, using the reports of a plagiarism detection software package. The results indicate a significant number of cases of cases of paraphrasing without citing the source, which supports the idea of the need for learning about this aspect of the problem. González-Teruel (2022) provides very interesting examples of paraphrasis and summary as a type of unconscious plagiarism. Sarmiento Campos et al. (2022) draw attention to conscious plagiarism as a socially tolerated university practice which is barely ever recognized and penalized. Other authors refer to conscious plagiarism as a consequence of the instructor’s approach to the subject, the teaching-and-learning methods, the workload, or the pressure of continual evaluation and work delivery deadlines (Hernández-Ruiz, 2016; Muñoz-Cantero & Espiñeira-Bellón, 2020; Sureda et al., 2009), and, especially in the digital environment, the degree of difficulty of the tasks (Gómez Espinosa et al., 2021).

As the Bachelor’s degrees studied are taught in a hybrid and virtual form, and are closely related to multimedia content and the Internet, knowledge about plagiarism on the Internet (question I.2.8) exceeds a mean of 70% in both students and instructors, but not in the case of copying a multimedia work which does not reach 60% (question I.2.7). Copying from the Internet without citing the author seems to be a well-known type of plagiarism given the high percentages it obtained in all the groups, among which the Master’s and CAV stand out (85.71% and 77.51%, respectively). Despite this solid knowledge of what is meant by plagiarism using the Internet, in the study with a national scope carried out by Comas et al. (2011), more than 60% of the students state that they put works together with snippets from the Internet without citation, and more than 85% believe that their peers have done the same. Especially in the digital environment, there is a great lack of knowledge deriving from the legislation related to intellectual property and copyright, not only regarding plagiarism but also regarding unauthorized downloading, installation of programs without a licence, and the non-legal copying of digital materials (Duarte-Hueros et al., 2016).

In our work, the PhD and Master’s students stand out in their knowledge of the types of plagiarism (with means of 71.25% and 75%, respectively), except for the purchase of a work (question I.2.5), an issue which the Bachelor’s degree students seem to be more familiar with. In 2011, Comas et al. (2011) already noted this as being the most fraudulent modality in the future. In a subsequent study conducted on students at the University of the Balearic Islands (Sureda et al., 2013), the percentage of students who said they believed that on some occasion their peers had paid to have a work done or purchased one was 32.2%. In the opinion of Comas-Forgas et al. (2021), the problem lies in the existence of websites where academic works can be bought and sold, and the advertising they use which encourages plagiarism and is a cause that negatively influences students. The conclusions of that study allude to the importance of ethics in the face of the legal vacuum that currently exists about this issue and that universities should resolve.

Both the instructors and the students were familiar with the anti-plagiarism tools available due to the inclusion of Urkund in the Moodle platform to verify practices and academic papers (question I.9, with a mean of 2.35 out of 3). Anti-plagiarism tools also establish typologies of plagiarism (Abad-García, 2018). Even so, they have their limitations since they fail to detect some of the types, the content used to carry out the checks is limited, they provide erroneous data or offer no relevant interpretation of those data, and they do not detect the plagiarism of ideas which is difficult in the case of paraphrasis or summary (Fernández Ramos, 2017; Lampert, 2008). Still, authors such as Martínez Sala et al. (2019) argue in favour of teaching anti-plagiarism programs to students and their use by instructors. Their study on 3rd year Advertising and Public Relations undergraduates at the University of Alicante notes the students’ use of anti-plagiarism platforms, apps, and free mobile phone apps to the detriment of the university’s official program, Turnitin. In their opinion, the weak point continues to be an improvement in knowledge about the concept and types of academic plagiarism.

With regard to the relationship of academic plagiarism with cross-cutting competencies, it has to be said that none of the 179 competencies of the Bachelor’s degrees involved in this research study make any mention of plagiarism. In addition, the results denote a clear need to include plagiarism in teaching, and reveal how small is the percentage of teaching methods on ways to avoid it. The students demand its teaching by instructors (question II.1, with means between 2.75 and 2.1 out of 3) and consider that it should be a cross-cutting competency (question II.2, between 2.71 and 1.97 out of 3). The instructors believe that it should be explained (II.1, with a mean of 2.92 out of 3), and that it also should be a cross-cutting competency (II.2, with 2.46 out of 3), but they have neither taught content related to it in their subjects (question II.3, with 1.15 out of 3, and question II.4.2, with just 23.08%) nor have they made use of the library, their thematic guides, or information resources (II.4.4, with 38.46%). The instructors were more dedicated to giving guidelines and practical comments than to teaching content in class and in seminars, fundamentally when correcting a works for end-of-studies projects and doctoral theses (II.4.5, with 69.23%), in a personalized way and not as a consequence of any policy of the institution. This need for the students to know what academic plagiarism is through their academic learning, whether taught on the part of the teaching staff or from the institution itself, is corroborated by the work of Muñoz Cantero et al. (2021) who analyse a sample of Bachelor’s and Master’s students in the branch of Social and Legal Sciences from the University of La Coruña (N = 1,985).

Although there was an uneven response from the different degrees on the way in which most of the students learn about aspects related to plagiarism, the PhD students pick them up as part of learning the subject of their thesis (II.4.2, with 60%), and the Master’s and Bachelor’s students by means of instructions (II.4.1, with proportions varying between 100% and practically 60%). The study of Sureda et al. (2013) presents a student’s perspective on the appropriate measures to reduce academic plagiarism. The greatest percentages refer to the organization of workshops and seminars for the students (37.8%) and for the instructors (34.5%), followed by awareness campaigns (25.5%). The need to organize seminars on plagiarism is fundamental in environments in which it is hardly ever used as a training method, as is the case at hand, where the low percentage obtained as a teaching method for students to learn about aspects related to plagiarism (question II.4.3, 4.88%) is particularly notable. To palliate this low value, we organized our Seminar on Plagiarism, with very positive results in participation, especially among the students since 63% of them belong to the said group. Conversely, less successful measures are the use of anti-plagiarism tools (9.3%) and regulations that include sanctions (5.4%). Different studies show the importance of the teaching-and-learning method and the relationship in class between the instructor and the students. This is the case of Muñoz-Cantero and Espiñeira-Bellón (2020) whose focus is on individualized attention for works of a theoretical nature. Others consider teaching precise instructions for the citation systems and bibliographical references, the design of the activities or coordination in the workload that the students are set, as well as collaboration in literacy programs between different agents of the University, especially the university library and the instructors or faculties, personalized assistance and workshops on visibility and reflection, not just offering information (Gil Cano et al., 2017; Lampert, 2008; Strittmatter & Bratton, 2014).

Although the present research has certain limitations as were noted in the methodology, the conclusions drawn from the results and their discussion provide a response to the research questions and the objectives set out at the start of this work, and suggest that this research has been productive and has revealed the university community’s need for learning about academic plagiarism, with it being necessary to continue working in this line since, as Granitz and Loewy (2007) or Strittmatter and Bratton (2014) note, dishonest behaviour will transcend the purely academic limit to end up being replicated in the professional and organizational context.

Hence, it is necessary to deepen further into the concept, typology, factors, and repercussions of academic plagiarism in terms of all its dimensions – social, legal, economic, as well as academic – on the part of students and instructors who are part of the Faculty and of these three Bachelor’s degrees. This is for themselves, for the university community, and for society in general. The usual tendency is to present plagiarism research from a single dimension. While the commonest dimension researchers use is the ethical, it must be borne in mind that ethics are linked to the legal and social aspect, and that this aspect cannot be understood without the economic and academic dimensions. Taking all the dimensions of plagiarism in the teaching-learning process into account may help to understand this phenomenon with greater accuracy, especially in light of the recent arrival of technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Likewise, it is necessary to create a university culture that Gómez Espinosa et al. (2021) have summarized significantly in four essential points: an internal policy, a conjoint learning plan, the definition of common values, and cross-cutting work in the academic curriculum. This Faculty has regulations, the latest being a Resolution of December 2023 on the Norms of coexistence and disciplinary regime of the UEx student body (University of Extremadura, 2024) in which there appear mentions of plagiarism in various articles, but the existing regulations do not specify or offer precise instructions on how to avoid plagiarism and do not cover all of its typology. Neither is there any joint institutional policy about the creation of values and documents of commitment for instructors and students. There are tools which are known by part of the university community, but attention has to be paid to the new forms of conscious plagiarism, such as purchasing works or the application of artificial intelligence to the preparation of academic works, with most recently the popularization of the ChatGPT tool. To this end, it is proposed to establish more precisely specified regulations and action protocols such as those that already exist in some foreign and Spanish universities, for example, that developed for students by the Rovira i Virgili University (2017). These should be of standardized use by all members of the university community, like any other type of already existing document, and also be disseminated by the students themselves through the Student Council as their governing and representative body.

Finally, the teaching-and-learning methods and the cross-cutting competencies in the different degree courses must be subjected to revision. Some have been shown to be effective, such as personal tutorials or instructions, but it would also be positive to introduce other collaborative procedures, such as visibility and reflection on the issue through the organization of workshops and seminars. In our case, the high attendance of teachers and students (especially the latter) at the Seminar held demonstrates its efficacy as a learning method. The conferences and seminars can offer a holistic vision of the problem of plagiarism, and can be carried out in collaboration with other agents of the university itself, such as the University Library Service which can provide examples from professional practice, and which would be in consonance with the definition that has been made of a cross-cutting competency.

Despite the complexity and obstacles involved in carrying out a research of these characteristics – (1) coordinating various degree courses (with the voluntary participation of students concerned about continuous assessment, exams, …), (2) working on a complicated theme (plagiarism) that a large majority of the university community knows little about, and (3) having a limited budget and limited time for the research and its dissemination, the participation of the various groups in the program activities (students, instructors, lecturers, and assistants) has been invaluable.