When I was a student, I read works by Philip Altbach and Hans de Wit. Later, I became a fan of Elena Denisova-Schmidt and her work on fraud and corruption in higher education. Something very special happens when you actualy get to work with folks whom you have admired for years or even decades. When Elena invited me to contribute to a new edited volume she was working on with Philip Altbach and Hans de Wit, I jumped at the chance.
“Introduction In this chapter, I discuss corruption in the post-plagiarism era, focusing specifically on the weaponization of plagiarism and, by extension, the manipulation of reputation by moral judgment using intentionally orchestrated campaigns or selective disclosure with a focus on higher education. I begin by defining key terms such as corruption, plagiarism, and post-plagiarism. Then, I discuss the development of corruption in the age of artificial intelligence. I explore the weaponization of reputation and morality, and consider the impact of such tactics on society and democracy. Corruption, moral grandstanding, and virtue signaling are not new; however, technologies such as social media platforms and artificial intelligence can—and have—catalyzed some forms of corruption. I conclude by considering the future of ethics and integrity in the post-plagiarism age, including a call to action to uphold and enact integrity going forward. While concerns about post-plagiarism extend to almost all areas of human life, in my chapter I deal only with the realm of higher education.”
Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD, is a Professor and Research Chair in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, Canada. Opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer.
This week I did an invited presentation for the European Network for Academic Integrity (ENAI) Integrity for All Working Group.
As part of my presentation, I shared this bibliography of resources that I’ve worked on over the past several years on academic integrity as it relates to equity, diversity, inclusion, accessibility, and decolonization. These topics have become increasingly important to me over the past half decade and it is more important now than it ever has been to elevate the importance of these topics, along with human rights and social justice, when addressing matters of student conduct.
This bibliography contains a list of academic integrity articles, presentations, and resources that focus on these topics.
I’ve done my best to prepare this list according to APA 7 conventions, but please forgive any errors.
I aim to make as much of my content open access. If there is anything on this list that you cannot access, please contact me directly and I’ll see what I can do.
Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD, is a Professor and Research Chair in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, Canada. Opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer.
Chapter 10 explores the theoretical, policy, and practical aspects of navigating pedagogical ethics in learning environments augmented by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). The chapter considers the role of higher education and the need to reconceptualize academic cheating in a post-plagiarism era. It discusses the role of learner agency, accountability, and responsibility within the context of learning and academic integrity. The chapter offers informed guidance for educators to incorporate GenAI in meaningful ways into teaching, learning, and assessment.
Our chapter is open access and free to read online and to download. We are really excited to continue the conversations happening about postplagiairsm and how we can can navigate teaching, learning, and assessment ethically in the age of generative AI.
Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD, is a Professor and Research Chair in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, Canada. Opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer.
In a recent talk I did at the University of Toronto Mississauga, I was chatting with a couple of folks afterwards and they asked if one specific slide was available as an infographic. It wasn’t and I promised to follow up. (This blog post is for you Amanda and Victoria!)
Artificial intelligence tools can generate human-like text and knowledge creation has become increasingly collaborative, questions arise about traditional academic practices. Although many conventions are being reimagined, citing, referencing, and attribution remain important. Attribution — acknowledging those who have shaped our thinking—transcends the mechanical act of citing sources according to prescribed formats. It represents an ethical commitment to intellectual honesty and respect (Eaton, 2023).
Attribution is a cornerstone of the postplagiarism framework. In the postplagiarism era, where the boundaries between human and AI-generated content blur and traditional definitions of authorship are challenged, the practice of acknowledging our intellectual influences becomes more vital, not less (Kumar, 2025). Attribution serves multiple purposes: it honors those who contributed to knowledge development, establishes credibility for the writer, and allows readers to explore foundational ideas more deeply.
Many educators and students mistakenly equate attribution with the technical minutiae of citation styles. I am talking here about the precise placement of commas, periods, and parentheses. While these conventions serve practical purposes in academic writing, they represent only the surface of what attribution entails (Gladue & Poitras Pratt, 2024). At its core, attribution demands that we answer questions such as: How do I know what I know? Who were my teachers? Whose ideas have influenced my thinking?
In this post (a re-blog from the postplagiarism site) I explore attribution as an enduring ethical principle within the postplagiarism framework. We’ll distinguish between citation as mechanical practice and attribution as intellectual honesty, examine how attribution practices might evolve with technology, and consider how we might teach attribution as a value rather than merely a skill (Eaton, 2024). Throughout, we’ll keep returning to a central idea: even as definitions of plagiarism transform, the need to recognize and pay respect to those from whom we have learned remains constant.
Attribution vs. Citation: Understanding the Differences
Understanding the distinction between attribution and referencing is crucial in our discussion of academic integrity in a postplagiarism era. The terms ‘referencing’ and ‘attribution’ are often used interchangeably, but they represent fundamentally different approaches to giving credit where it is due. In the table below, I present an overview of some of the differences.
Table 1
Attribution versus Referencing
Citing and Referencing
First, let’s talk about citing and referencing. Citing is often referred to in-text citation. In APA format, for example, we cite sources in the main body of the text as we write. Then, we produce a list of references, usually with the heading “References” at the end of the paper. (I have modelled this practice throughout). If we follow APA, the sources cited in the body of the text should exactly match the sources in the reference list at the end, and vice versa. So, citing and referencing go hand-in-hand. For the purposes of this post, I’ll use the term ‘referencing’ collectively to refer to both citing and referencing, given that the two are intertwined.
A foundational question about referencing is: How can I learn and demonstrate the technical norms of a prescribed style manual?
Let me give you an example of what I mean. I did my undergraduate and master’s degrees in literature. We used the Modern Language Association (MLA) style guide. When I moved over to Education to undertake my PhD, I had to learn a completely different style, the one prescribed by the American Psychological Association (APA), as that is the style used across much of the social sciences. I often describe having to shift from learning MLA style to APA style as intellectual trauma. I had spent years meticulously learning to be rule-compliant to MLA style. I knew the details of MLA style inside and out. Having to learn APA style meant unlearning everything I’d spent years learning about MLA style. My PhD supervisor marked up drafts of my work with a red pen, noting APA errors everywhere.
I bought the APA style guide (we were using the 5th edition back then) and set out to memorize every detail to ensure that I knew the rules. Citing and referencing are taught and evaluated using style guides, checklists, and technical rubrics to evaluate how well someone has followed the rules. Citing and referencing are essentially about rule compliance.
Attribution
Attribution goes beyond the technical aspects of rule compliance. When we give attribution, we dig deeper into questions about our intellectual lineage. We ask: How do I know what I know? Who did I learn from? Who influenced the those from whom I have learned?
Attribution requires meta-cognitive awareness and evaluative judgement. If you are unfamiliar with these concepts, I recommend the work of Bearman and Luckin (2020), Fischer et al. (2024), and Tai et al. (2018). Collectively, they explain evaluative judgement and meta-cognitive awareness better than I ever could.
(If you’re paying attention, you’ll see that I just combined citing with attribution there… I provided the sources as per the citing rules of APA, and I also talked about how I learned about deeper concepts from some terrific folks who have done deep work on the topic. See, you can combine citing and referencing with attribution. It’s not all or nothing.)
We teach attribution through a shared collective understanding, by establishing communal expectations and through (often informal) relational coaching.
In everyday conversations, we often reference where we learned ideas. We say, “As my grandmother always said…” or “I read in an article that…” These informal attribution practices demonstrate how instinctively we connect ideas to their sources. Citing and referencing formalizes socialized practices that have extended across various cultures for centuries.
When we give attribution, we show gratitude for the conversations, texts, and teachings that have formed our understanding. This perspective shifts attribution from a defensive practice (avoiding plagiarism accusations) to an affirmative one (acknowledging the intellectual debt we owe to others who have generously shared their knowledge with us).
Acknowledging Others’ Work in the Age of GenAI
Generative AI tools have disrupted our traditional understandings of authorship and attribution. These technologies create new questions about intellectual ownership and acknowledgment practices that our citing and referencing systems weren’t designed to address. GenAI models produce outputs based on massive training datasets containing human-created works. When a student uses ChatGPT to draft an essay, the resulting text represents a complex blend of sources that even the AI developers cannot fully trace. This opacity challenges our ability to attribute ideas to their original creators (Kumar, 2025).
The collaborative nature of AI-assisted writing further blurs authorship boundaries. Who deserves credit when a human prompts, edits, and refines AI-generated text? The distinction between tool and co-creator is difficult to establish. This is another tenet in the postplagiarism framework.
In work led by my colleague, Dr. Soroush Sabbagan, we found graduate students wanted agency in how they integrate AI tools while maintaining academic integrity (Sabbaghan and Eaton (2025). The graduate students who participated in our study, “Participants also emphasized the importance of combining their own expertise and judgment with the AI’s suggestions to create truly original research.” (Sabbaghan & Eaton, 2025, p. 18).
The postplagiarism framework offers helpful guidance by distinguishing between control and responsibility. Although students may share control with AI tools, they retain full responsibility for the integrity of their work, including proper attribution of all sources, both human and machine. Ultimately, the goal isn’t to prevent AI use but to cultivate ethical practices for learning, working, and living.
As Corbin et al (2025) have noted, AI presents wicked problems when it comes to assessment. I would extend their idea further by saying that AI presents wicked problems for plagiarism in general. There are no absolute definitions of plagiarism, but if we think about citing, referencing, and giving attribution as ways of preventing or mitigating plagiarism, then AI has certainly complicated everything. These are problems that we do not have all the answers to, but disentangling the difference between rule-based referencing and attribution as a social practice of paying our respects to those from whom we have learned, might be one step forward as we enter into a postplagiarism age.
The ideas I’ve shared here are not intended to be exhaustive, but rather to help folks make sense of some key differences between referencing and giving attribution and to recognize that citing and referencing are deeply connected to rule compliance and technical rules, whereas giving attribution can at times be imprecise, but may in fact be more deeply-rooted in a desire to give respect where it is due.
As I have tried to model above, it does not have to be all or nothing. Referencing can exist in the absence of any desire to respect others for the work they have created and attribution can be given orally or in any variety of ways that may not comply with a technical style guide. When we are working with students, it can be helpful to unpack the differences and talk about why both are need in academic environments.
There is more to say on this topic, but I’ll wrap up here for now. Thanks again to Amanda and Victoria, who nudged me to write down and share ideas that I have been talking about for a few years now.
References
Bearman, M., & Luckin, R. (2020). Preparing university assessment for a world with AI: Tasks for human intelligence. In M. Bearman, P. Dawson, R. Ajjawi, J. Tai, & D. Boud (Eds.), Re-imagining University Assessment in a Digital World (pp. 49–63). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41956-1_5
Corbin, T., Bearman, M., Boud, D., & Dawson, P. (2025). The wicked problem of AI and assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2025.2553340
Eaton, S. E. (2023). Postplagiarism: Transdisciplinary ethics and integrity in the age of artificial intelligence and neurotechnology. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 19(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-023-00144-1
Eaton, S. E. (2024). Decolonizing academic integrity: Knowledge caretaking as ethical practice. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(7), 962-977. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2024.2312918
Fischer, J., Bearman, M., Boud, D., & Tai, J. (2024). How does assessment drive learning? A focus on students’ development of evaluative judgement. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(2), 233–245. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2023.2206986
Kumar, R. (2025). Understanding PSE students’ reactions to the postplagiarism concept: a quantitative analysis. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 21(1), 9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-025-00182-x
Sabbaghan, S., & Eaton, S. E. (2025). Navigating the ethical frontier: Graduate students’ experiences with generative AI-mediated scholarship. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-024-00454-6
Tai, J., Ajjawi, R., Boud, D., Dawson, P., & Panadero, E. (2018). Developing evaluative judgement: enabling students to make decisions about the quality of work. Higher Education, 76(3), 467–481. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-017-0220-3
Note: This is a re-blog. See the original post here:
It’s the first of September and I am going to start the school year with a post that may be seem a little off beat for me. It’s about clothing. Specifically, it’s about the attire that we wear to school or to work.
When I was a young girl, after my parents separated I moved with my Mum back to her homeland of the UK where she could be closer to her family. I have written about this time in my life elsewhere, as it was formative in so many ways. I was enrolled in elementary school near where we lived. Like so many British and colonial schools, wearing a uniform was compulsory.
God, how I hated that uniform! It was comprised of a grey tunic dress, a while button-up shirt, and a tie.
I was a chubby kid and school uniforms are not meant for kids like me. It never fit properly and there was no way to fix that, at least not as far as I was told. It was scratchy, like a burlap sack. Being clumsy and uncoordinated, the worst part of the whole thing was the tie. I had to stand in front of the mirror for hours practising the sailor’s knot that I had to learn to do by myself. God, it was awful.
My mother let me know in no uncertain terms that I was not to complain about the uniform. She worked hard to be able to send me to a good school, and even though it may not have been the very best school, she sacrificed a lot so I could wear that prickly and irritating garb that I hated so much.
Even the labels had to stay because bits of the uniform had to have our names on them. That made it even worse. At least with “home clothes” as we would call them, Mum would carefully remove the sewn-in labels with a small pair of scissors. She did the same for her own clothes. The truth is, neither of us were very good at tolerating them. Oh, how clothes felt so much better without labels!
I spent most of my childhood wearing clothes that were chosen for me. Being a “chunky” girl meant there weren’t as many clothing options available to me. Besides, my clothing choices almost never met with approval because what I liked was too weird or I made choices based on how the clothes felt to me, rather than how they looked. As a result, I was usually told what to wear and there was no discussion about it.
As I grew up and moved through my teen years into my twenties, I started making my own decisions about what to wear. I would almost always gravitate toward black clothes. Not because I was into the goth movement or wanted to make any kind of particular fashion statement, but because they were practical. Firstly, black goes with everything. Secondly, being clumsy means that I spill things on myself far more than is socially acceptable and black clothes seem easier to clean.
I remember being told things by well-meaning folks such as, “But dear, navy would look so much better on you!” Or ‘Black is just so depressing!”
I resisted, in part because I could. I had spent years following other people’s rules about what was and was not acceptable to wear. When I could choose, I gravitated towards soft black clothes without labels or with labels that I could remove easily. To this day, my closet is filled with mostly black, with the odd bit of colour here and there.
When I was an assistant professor, I recall the start of one school year where a previous administrator said to me, “Well, summer is over now. We have to start dressing professionally again.” The ‘we’ in her commentary wasn’t a collective ‘we’. She was directing her comment at me specifically, since I was the only one in the room at the time. The ‘we’ was said in that righteous dowager Countess way that let’s you know that she did not approve and was giving me instructions.
Looking back, there was nothing at all wrong with my summer attire. My clothes were always clean and I was appropriately covered, but you see, that particular officious bureaucrat liked jackets… One always had to wear a jacket to be considered professional. Of course, the occasional twin set was acceptable, but only if it was some typically feminine shade of blue or pink, or maybe violet. I had spent the summer in short-sleeved shirts and trousers, which is pretty standard for me in the summer.
I don’t mind jackets and in fact, I wear them often. What I objected to was someone telling me, yet again, that my clothing choices were inadequate. That I was inadequate because of what I chose to wear… that in order to be successful, one needs to conform.
Well, let me tell you, wearing a uniform as a six-year old didn’t make me any better of a student in elementary school, just as wearing mostly black as an adult most of the time doesn’t make me depressing. I spent years, decades even, trying to accept that if clothes didn’t feel good that it was somehow my fault and I should just learn to live with it.
Now that I have achieved some modicum of success in my career, let me share a secret… I do my best work when I’m comfortable with what I’m wearing. When I don’t have to fuss with ill-fitting clothes, sharp labels or irritating seams, I’m less distracted. That frees up my mental, emotional, and physical energy to do my best work. Maybe you feel the same way? Let me be clear: clothes matter, but they don’t matter in the same way to everyone.
This school year, I invite you to do two things. First, wear the clothes that make you feel good, whatever that means for you (without breaking any decency laws, of course). Second, when it comes to others’ clothes, keep your opinions to yourself. Bite your tongue and just don’t talk about it… not to the person’s face and not behind their back. Just get on with your own business. Say to yourself, “My job is to accept and appreciate others for who they are.” Full stop. Unless someone asks you for fashion advice, then keep your mouth shut. Maybe, just maybe, that person’s clothing choices are part of what helps them bring their best self to work or to school. If you let them be, you might just be helping to create an environment where they can thrive.
I intend to bring my best self to school this year and I’m going to do it with my own kind of flair. You’ll probably see me roaming around campus in wearing mostly black most of the time. Whatever I wear is going to soft and cozy free of those instruments of torture known as labels. Dress for success? Damn right I will. It’s going to be glorious!
References
Eaton, S. E. (2020). Challenging and critiquing notions of servant leadership: Lessons from my mother. In S. E. Eaton & A. Burns (Eds.), Women Negotiating Life in the Academy: A Canadian Perspective (pp. 15–23). Springer Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3114-9_2
Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD, is a Professor and Research Chair in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, Canada. Opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer.
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