How can I convince graduate students in China to not copy/paste from the Internet into their research papers? I'm posting from an anonymous account, for reasons that will be obvious.

I'm an associate professor in China at one of the top 10 universities in China, and have been working in China for a number of years. Most research in our lab is respectable and unproblematic.  We get some papers in top journals and conferences.

As a native English speaker, I help on papers from graduate students.
Some of these papers are conference papers, and some are journal papers.  The conference papers I work on are international.

However, probably between 30% to 50% of the Chinese graduate students I work with copy and paste from the Internet into their research papers (from Wikipedia, from other papers, from software documentation, and so on).  The amount ranges from a sentence here and there, to whole sections.
It's usually easy for me to notice copy/pasted material (it's where they suddenly write like a native English speaker with 10+ years of research experience).  Yesterday, I encountered the worst instance of copy/paste I've ever seen, and I flatly refused to be listed as a co-author.

What's become clear:


The students generally think it's acceptable to copy/paste; they're unconcerned even if it's published.
Part of the motivation behind copy/pasting is that English is their second language.
The Chinese professors (i.e., their supervisors) mostly do not read their students' papers; they might take a quick check before submission.
The Chinese professors push the students into rushing to meet conference submission deadlines, and I feel this has a negative impact on both their research and paper-writing quality.
The university doesn't outright condone plagiarism, but they don't seem to think of it as a negative.  I get the impression that it's considered efficient use of time.  The focus is on getting it published, while significance, errors, and plagiarism are less important.
Many of the students do not intend to have careers in academia.  The paper will not have much significance, but it's either required for their degree, or their supervisor is pushing them into writing it.  They don't care much.


I've explained how serious a matter this is, over and over.  And honestly, I'm fed up repeating myself – it makes me feel like the university (and research in China) is a joke.  It makes me feel ashamed to work here.

I've tried repeatedly explaining this to everyone, but the seriousness is not getting through.  They just think I'm overreacting.

Q: How can I convince graduate students in China to not copy/paste from the Internet into their research papers?

I'm looking for an answer along the lines of "the negative consequences of copy/pasting from the Internet in publications are blah".  I have no intention to pack up and leave; I just want to get the message across and convince them that plagiarism matters.  So I'm thinking about writing a document entitled e.g. "why we shouldn't plagiarize" and sending it around.
OK, it's getting weird now. I thought this would be much less common in top 10s.

There's a simple path here: tell them plagiarized papers are not going to get published, or will be retracted in the future, and this will hinder their graduation &amp; will create trouble for their advisor (+ advisor would lose face) if they insist on submitting such papers. 

When your students (and everyone else) care only about the "pragmatic", give them "pragmatic" reasons! Chinese people generally do not like creating trouble/making others lose face, so that's a good path.

Convincing them that plagiarism is morally incorrect and not right would be harder, and students would likely not buy into that. But the pragmatic path gets the job done :-)



From the situation you described, I infer two things about your situation. Correct me if I am wrong:


The university you're at is likely not top-tier. I would be surprised if even the researchers at Tsinghua or Jiaoda (Shanghai Jiaotong University) engage in academically dishonest conduct frequently. I suppose you're likely at a local (provincial) university.
Your colleagues/students are mainly targeting domestic conferences/journals (and likely not the top ones). Otherwise they will surely know that academically dishonest practices will get their papers rejected.


If both are true, I'm afraid little could be done. You could try very hard to at least make your students not plagiarize, but this will probably have a very negative impact on future recruitment, and even your students are not going to 100% listen to you. The best option at hand is trying to move to another university (preferably in another country) if this bothers you (it would bother me for sure). 



The ranty part: I decided to delete this, but just keep two key points.


Plagiarism is not dealt with seriously enough and people let it happen. Awareness of what constitutes plagiarism is low, but for reasonably experienced researchers this should be obvious. So, as you see, the problem is not that people don't know it is plagiarism; they likely do know, but they have no reason to care.
The quality of most domestic journals &amp; conferences are questionable, so the problem is even more serious at this level (because not even the editors care).