Academic Integrity
The commitment to honesty, fairness, and responsibility in scholarship, covering how research is done, reported, and credited.
Academic integrity is the set of values and practices that keep scholarship trustworthy: honesty about what you did and found, fair credit to others through accurate citation, responsible handling of data and participants, and transparency about help received. Breaches include plagiarism, fabrication or falsification of data, unauthorized collaboration, contract cheating, and undisclosed reuse of prior work. Universities codify these expectations in policies that apply fully to theses.
A thesis is examined as a claim about what you personally did, so integrity questions are existential rather than procedural. Keep records that let you demonstrate honesty: raw data, analysis files, ethics approvals, supervision notes, and any required disclosures about tools or assistance. Building these habits during the project is far easier than reconstructing evidence when an examiner or integrity office asks questions after submission.
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