In February, sections of the media reported that the University Grants Commission had returned several PhD theses submitted to the Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar Bihar University in Muzaffarnagar. The commission found that around 40% of the theses had been written using artificial intelligence. The university was instructed to ask the researchers to rewrite and resubmit their work.
Despite this, the commission has not yet issued any formal guidelines on the use of AI in academic research. In June, The Times of India reported that the UGC had issued revised guidelines stating that a PhD with 10% to 40% of content generated by AI or which has been plagiarised will be returned to the scholar for revision within six months.
AI would be permitted only for language correction and other limited support, the article said. These guidelines did not appear to be immediately available on the UGC website.
But the guidelines, as reported by the newspaper, raise an important question: can the use of AI in research be treated as plagiarism?
Good research is expected to contribute new knowledge to the existing body of scholarship and open up new avenues for further research. To achieve this, a researcher must perform a few basic tasks.
First, they must familiarise themselves with the existing scholarship in the chosen field and...
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