Intelligent copying is quite OK

In my discussion on plagiarism in recent workshop, I mentioned that plagiarism was bad, while intelligent copying was quite acceptable. In formulating dissertation proposals, students sometimes had difficulties to come up with appropriate proposal ideas and related research design. I encouraged students to browse through relevant academic journal articles and, using a specific academic journal article, a student can then adopt and adapt the research theme, the research questions, research design and business/ management theories so as to come up with their own proposals. For example, if the academic article was about a study in manufacturing sector, yours could be on the service sector. If the academic article studied female employees, yours can be on male employees. If the academic article employed a sophisticated statistical analysis, your dissertation project can employ a much less sophisticated statistical analysis. In the process, you still need to do your own literature review to adapt (not just adopt) the ideas from the academic article you have considered for intelligent copying.

As a start, you need to know how to use the university  e-library so as to access the major academic journal publisers' websites. From there you could find academic articles that you are interested in studying for your dissertation works.


In short, intelligent copying is quite OK while plagiarism is not.