Background: Plagiarism is considered as an act of ‘fraud’ there is need to create awareness about Plagiarism among junior researchers & students who are conducting the research as a part of their degree course. Because of the requirement of the curriculum, pressure of the study, variety of source of Literature materials, unclear writing instructions can lead to plagiarism among the nursing students. With the uses of various software and as it is made mandatory the plagiarized work can be easily identified investigated and punished. This article provides information regarding knowledge of plagiarism among the final year nursing students.

Methods: In this study a quantitative approach with Non-experimental exploratory research design was used. Research variable was knowledge of plagiarism. The setting of the study was selected nursing colleges of Pune city. Population was final year students of nursing course. Sample size was 330 nursing students of selected colleges of Pune city. Non probability convenient sampling technique was used. Structured questionnaire was used for data collection. The survey questions were prepared in Google forms. The survey questionnaire consisted of two sections. First section was regarding demographic data of the participants; second section had 20 questions about knowledge of plagiarism. The survey link was given to all participants after their consent. Validity of the tool was done by all experts from nursing field. Reliability was done by test-retest method. Reliability coefficient for knowledge questionnaire was 0.8. Pilot study was conducted on 10% of the total sample and the study was found feasible. Data analysis was done by using descriptive and inferential statistics.

Results: This study shows 246 participants were female and 84 participants were male students.241 participants knew that citing the source, write in own words, using plagiarism check are some of the steps to prevent plagiarism. 60% to 70% participants new the correct answer that when student fail to cite properly or put the content in his own wards it is known as unintentional plagiarism, using standard research tool without author’s permission is allowed in the research, paraphrased passages still require citation because the ideas came from another source, even though you are putting them in your own words, while paraphrasing the content you should not just replace few words but present the content in your own words, copyright is a set of exclusive rights granted to the creator of an original work and 10 to 15% plagiarism is allowed for thesis as per the policy of institute.

Conclusion: From the above findings, the researcher concluded that majority of the participants that is 101 participants had good knowledge, 199 participants had average knowledge about plagiarism and 30 participants had poor knowledge about plagiarism. It suggests there is a need to create awareness about plagiarism among the students to generate good quality research work.