6.5 Research Ethics and Plagiarism

The ethics' pillars (the exam's frame): 1. Honesty: no fabrication (data invented), no falsification (data cooked), no plagiarism (words- and-ideas stolen). 2. The human subjects' protections: the informed consent (the participant's knowing agreement — the vulnerable's special care: the prisoners, the victims, the children); the confidentiality (the anonymisation's craft — the names' removal, the places' masking); the no- harm principle (the re-traumatisation's avoidance — the victim-interview's ethics); the exit- right (the withdrawal's freedom). 3. The field's permissions: the institutions' protocols (the courts' and prisons' authorisation letters); the gatekeepers' respect; the data's lawful collection. 4. The authorship's honesty: the contribution's order; the acknowledgment of the assistants; the AI-tools' transparent use (6.6's frontier). Plagiarism (the special sin): the words-and- ideas of another presented as one's own — the forms: the verbatim copy (the quote- marks' absence), the mosaic/patchwork (the paraphrased collage without credit), the paraphrase-without-citation, the self-plagiarism (the own-work's recycling), and the AI- generated text's undeclared use (the universities' newest frontier). The antidotes: the quotation-and-citation's discipline (6.4); the paraphrase's honest craft (the source's credit with the new words); the plagiarism-detection tools (the Turnitin-class software's submission culture); and the penalty's reality (the university's codes — the failure, the expulsion; the profession's mirror — the misconduct discipline of the Bar's conduct rules, Nepali Legal System's terrain). The exam's phrasing: research ethics is not the…