Written scientific discourse: ethical aspect

The aim of the study is to identify the attitude of representatives of the Russian professional scientific community and participants in student research activities towards plagiarism and improper borrowing of scientific works. The study differentiates the concepts of plagiarism and dishonesty, addresses issues of detection of undocumented borrowings, and analyzes the perception of ethical problems of written scientific communication based on a survey. These problems include direct and indirect copying of texts or their fragments, generation, and editing of scientific content. The scientific novelty of the proposed study lies in the fact that the problems of plagiarism and dishonest scientific research in modern Russian linguistics are discussed for the first time in comparing the positions of two participants in scientific discourse, i.e., the faculty and students. As a result, it was found that the concept of plagiarism receives contradictory interpretations by different groups of respondents: negative – from the professional scientific community and neutral – from the perspective of novice researchers. Analysis of the contexts of the respondents’ answers demonstrated a low level of expression of motivation for independent research work, which in turn necessitates the development of a number of measures by society and the academic community to maintain ethical guidelines in scientific discourse.