It is getting really frustrating to get requests to edit/review thesis or literature review that actually expect me to write most of the document or rewrite copy pasted chunks so that they are not caught by softwares like TurnItIn. The requests come from people supposedly in North America or Europe. So before you jump in and decide it might be a third world country problem, it is not.

I am perplexed. Do these people not know that it is unethical or they do not think they will get caught or may be there are no repercussions? I voiced this frustration while chatting with a group of school friends. One of them an established scientist in US now. She completed her Masters in India before going to US to complete her Doctorate. She commented that she did not know about plagiarism or how to do a literature review till she wrote her first paper and was told not to do a patchwork copy paste work like that again. She had a better mentors who eduated her. However, I also know another story from Columbia University, my alma mater where computer science students got in serious trouble for using part of code from each other.

Is nobody teaching students how to conduct or write literature review along the way?

I try to remember where/when/how I learned it. It is difficult to pin point now after all this time and it has become so everyday. Probably learned along the way in multiple courses, or watching other senior researchers may be?

One specific overtly designed experience I remember was in Prof. Lin’s class on Metacognition. She asked us to summarize the paper as per a structure, a table or a form she had provided. By second or third week we learnt to give a quick read to the assigned papers for the week and pick up the most important points instead of getting stuck in the weeds. I also remember writing literature reviews as part of class assignments for at least 2-3 subjects.