2025/10 | Navigating Ethical Issues in Student Writing: STEM Essays, Term Papers & Literature Reviews
Academic Publishing Navigator, 2025, Art. 10
Navigating Ethical Issues in Student Writing: STEM Essays, Term Papers & Literature Reviews
Ethical issues in students’ writing in STEM (essays, term papers, literature reviews, project reports) center on honesty, fairness, and respect for the scientific record. These issues affect not only grades but also future research culture and public trust in science.
Navigating ethical issues in student writing, particularly in STEM essays, term papers, and literature reviews, involves understanding and addressing plagiarism, academic integrity, and ethical standards. These issues are critical as they uphold the credibility and trustworthiness of scholarly work. The integration of ethical writing skills into STEM education can be achieved through various strategies, including the use of resources like the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and realistic case studies that challenge students' ethical understanding.
1. Plagiarism and poor source use
- Copying text, formulas, code, figures, or ideas from articles, theses, websites, or AI tools without clear citation is a major violation.
- Patchwriting (changing a few words while keeping structure) and over-reliance on review articles instead of original sources distort the scientific record and hide the real contributors.
- Inadequate skills in paraphrasing, summarizing, and referencing often lead to unintentional plagiarism, showing the need for explicit teaching of research and writing skills.
2. Contract cheating and purchased work
Paying others or using “essay mills” and ghostwriters to produce lab reports, term papers, or literature reviews undermines learning and misrepresents competence.
In STEM, this can extend to outsourcing data analysis, programming assignments, or project write‑ups, creating safety and reliability risks when unqualified individuals later work in real‑world settings.
3. Misuse of generative AI tools
- Using AI systems to generate essays, code, or literature reviews without disclosure raises questions about authorship, originality, and intellectual honesty.
- Ethical use of AI requires:
- Stating that AI was used and how.
- Checking accuracy (AI can invent citations or results).
Ensuring that the student’s own critical thinking, interpretation of data, and argumentation remain central.
4. Fabrication and falsification of information
- Fabrication: inventing data, experiments, references, or “results” in assignments or literature reviews.
- Falsification: altering data, graphs, or statistical outputs to look “better” or to fit a desired conclusion.
In STEM, this is especially serious because it trains students to see data manipulation as acceptable, weakening future research integrity.
5. Citation manipulation and biased literature reviews
- Selectively citing only sources that support a preferred conclusion, ignoring contradictory evidence, creates misleading narratives about what is known.
- Inflating reference lists with irrelevant citations, self‑citations, or citing papers without reading them is dishonest and weakens critical engagement with the literature.
- Over‑reliance on secondary sources (review articles, blogs) instead of engaging with primary research leads to shallow understanding and error propagation.
6. Collaboration vs. collusion
- Group work is common in STEM, but unacknowledged collaboration on individual essays, take‑home exams, or coding tasks is unethical.
- Sharing full solutions, lab reports, or code for others to submit as their own crosses the line from help to collusion, even if motivated by friendship or pressure.
7. Pressures and systemic factors
- High workload, assessment pressure, math or statistics anxiety, and fear of failure can push students toward unethical shortcuts rather than genuine learning.
- Weak instruction in research methods, academic writing, and integrity policies means some students genuinely “don’t know how to do it right,” so prevention must include teaching, not only punishment.
8. Good practices to prevent ethical problems
Students can reduce ethical risks by:
- Learning and practicing proper citation, paraphrasing, and summarizing from early courses, using clear institutional guidelines.
- Keeping transparent research notebooks, version‑controlled code, and data records to avoid later fabrication or confusion.
- Using AI tools, peers, and online resources only as permitted, always acknowledging their role and verifying any content they provide.
- Seeking support (writing centers, librarians, instructors) when unsure about referencing, methodology, or what counts as collaboration.
Teachers and institutions can help by designing scaffolded assignments, allowing drafts and feedback, and embedding explicit academic integrity education into STEM curricula so students learn both how and why to write ethically.