research in colleges.

A couple of months back, I had given a talk to my colleagues on plagiarism. I am not an expert on this subject, but I do know more than my audience.

The college management had decided a few years back to honour and reward anyone who published a book or a research paper. Every Sept 5th, we have a ceremony to honour these lecturers. This led to a race for publishing textbooks and research papers. Most of the books are cut-paste jobs (literally). Hence the talk.

During the interaction after the talk, one of my colleagues, who had registered for her PhD, told me that her research guide admonished her and told her not to write her own stuff. He told her she must re-search what is already there and present that. This is the view of most research guides who cater to this UGC-driven race for PhD.

In the talk, I also managed to get in edgewise, my two bits worth about experimental data ...importance of reproducibility...since many have published papers based on experiments done once only.

However, I doubt if I have made much difference to the existing culture, but have probably made myself unpopular.