Investigators at the National Science Foundation (NSF) turned up nearly 100 cases of suspected plagiarism in proposals funded by the agency during the fiscal year 2011, all of which are now being investigated. The NSF’s Office of Inspector General (IG), an internal but independent watchdog, used plagiarism detection software to analyze some 8,000 successful funding applications, and flagged 1 to 1.5 percent of cases as suspicious—though it’s not clear what percentage of these are self-plagiarism, in which researchers lift sections from the materials and methods or even introductions of their own previous proposals. Please be careful and not plagiarize in your proposals.
