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Critical Information Literacy: Home

Navigating Academic Integrity, Anti-Plagiarism, AI Language Models, Critical Thinking, and Referencing Styles

Welcome

Unisa Code of Conduct provides a framework for reflecting its fundamental principles and values, including integrity, respect, expertise, and involvement. Research and Academic integrity are crucial to good research practices and ethical behavior within educating future generations of researchers. Unisa supports the South African Code of Conduct for Research Integrity, which includes adhering to relevant regulations such as those concerning data management, copywrite, Intellectual property and personal data, as well as potentially undergoing review by the Unisa ethics office. Upcoming online module required for M & D students in preparation of their academic program that will take 90 minutes to complete at one's own pace. Passing the test is mandatory under the Training and Supervision Plan.

 

Research Integrity Academic Integrity Critical Information Literacy

Research integrity refers to the ethical conduct of research, encompassing the principles and practices that researchers should adhere to throughout the research process. It emphasizes honesty, transparency, accountability, and the responsible handling of data.

Research integrity involves ensuring the accuracy and reliability of research findings, avoiding plagiarism and fabrication, and following ethical guidelines for the protection of human subjects, animal welfare, and intellectual property.

It is primarily concerned with maintaining high ethical standards within the research community and upholding the integrity of scientific knowledge.

 

 Academic integrity focuses on ethical behavior within the educational context, particularly in academic institutions.

It encompasses honesty, fairness, and responsibility in academic endeavors such as assignments, exams, papers, and presentations.

Academic integrity requires students and scholars to properly attribute sources, avoid plagiarism, cite references accurately, and uphold the academic norms and rules of their institution.

It also includes respecting intellectual property rights, collaborating ethically, and upholding the values of honesty, integrity, and intellectual rigor in academic work.

Critical information literacy goes beyond the concepts of research integrity and academic integrity, although they share some overlapping elements.

Critical information literacy emphasizes the critical analysis and engagement with information in various contexts, including but not limited to academic research.

It focuses on empowering individuals to question and challenge the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of information production, dissemination, and use.

Critical information literacy encourages individuals to recognize biases, power structures, and hidden agendas in information sources, while also developing skills in locating, evaluating, and using information effectively.

It fosters the ability to think critically, consider multiple perspectives, and engage in informed decision-making.

 

Unisa Policies on Research and Academic Integrity

Students Values and Rules

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Disclaimer

Due to contractual and licensing agreements, access to some content may be restricted to the Unisa community. 

Inclusion in this LibGuide does not imply University or library endorsement of the ideas expressed.

Academic integrity

University of South Africa's mission is to advance research, knowledge development guided by the following three terms: 

DEFINITION OF ACADEMIC INTEGRITY:

The Unisa 's definition of academic integrity as the meaningful and concerted effort to ensure concern for human dignity, honesty, trust, fairness, truthfulness, accuracy, respect and responsibility in teaching, research and community engagement.

QUALITY:

Teaching, research and community engagement must meet the national and international standards det for academic work.

GOOD PRACTICE:

refers to the disciplinary rules in all disciplines and includes, amongst others, aspects related to experimentation, data gathering, presentation of results, referencing and writing as required by every discipline.

Consequences of Plagiarism

Unisa's Academic Integrity Transgressions:

Academic integrity transgression refers to a conduct or omission in any teaching and learning, community engagement or research endeavor that violates the values associated with academic integrity and includes any act that is defined to give an unfair or undeserved academic advantage. an important risk associated with academic integrity of academic outputs by UNISA employees and students.

Academic outputs refer to all academic and scholarly works artistic works, electronic works, literary works, multimedia products, research outputs, written or otherwise, created by employees and students for teaching and learning, community engagement or research.

All academic activities including outputs, written or otherwise, submitted by employees, research associates or students are expected to be based on sound ethical grounds and should be the results of a person's own skill and labour. 

 

Students have the responsibility to uphold the Academic Integrity Policy.

Students have the responsibility to maintain the academic integrity principles set out below in the production and presentation of academic outputs, regardless of the presentation format and/or work type:

  • student should submit his/her own original work. (Except in in group work)
  • student should acknowledge other people's work by way of referencing or citing (using the correct referencing style like Harvard or APA or CHICANCO etc.)
  • No student shall exhibit or submit the following forms of works multimedia, electronic, artistic of others as their own.
  • student should accurately indicate the download/access date and uniform resources locator (URL) of the internet web page or other electronic sources.
  • no student should allow another person's to use or copy or present his/her academic output as their own.
  • student must adhere to the rules of assignments whether they venue based or not.
  • each student is required to attach the declaration of Originality see below.

Branch Librarian - Research Commons

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Refilwe Phala
Contact:
Research Commons

Level 4

Library

+2712 4292894

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