Plagiarism in research: Special reference to initiatives taken by Indian organisations

With the advent of Internet and new technologies variety of information sources are coming up. The thirst of information in R&D activities has become ever growing and ever demanding. The information is becoming more digital and people are getting easy access to abundant information which leads to the temptation of using and copying it and stealing other ideas without knowing the implications and without acknowledging the original contributor in completion of their research and projects. The act of stealing original work without acknowledging its author/contributor is plagiarism that has become an accelerating issue in this era of Information & Communication Technology. This paper provides an overview about plagiarism, plagiarism in research, and various commercial and free plagiarism detection tools available. Further the paper presents the latest plagiarism cases reported from India and abroad and initiatives taken by academic and research institutes in India to detect and prevent plagiarism.