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The growth of the number of journals and the need for research output for academic promotion and completion has added to the rapid increase in the size and frequency of publication of scholarly content. The chances of plagiarism, whether knowingly or unknowingly, have also increased, which is a matter of significant concern in the research fraternity. Plagiarism has been a menace to scientific or intellectual work in various forms. Although several laws and organizations have been introduced to tackle this issue, it is still one of the problems making the scientific community suffers as it leads to the retraction of published works or banning the researchers from publishing. This happens because many times the authors do not abide by the guidelines or have very less idea of plagiarism. “Many people think of plagiarism as copying another's work or borrowing someone else's original ideas, but terms like 'copying' and 'borrowing' can disguise the seriousness of the offence. According to Merriam-Webster online dictionary ‘Plagiarism’ is defined as the theft and use of other people's ideas or words as their own, use of sources without attribution, literary theft, or presenting some ideas as own and as it is new, while this idea already exists in other sources. It is an act of fraud as it involves both stealing someone else’s work and lying about it afterward.”(What Is Plagiarism?, 2017). “Plagiarism has been traditionally defined as the taking of words, images, processes, structure, and design elements, ideas, etc. of others and presenting them as one's own. It is often associated with phrases such as the kidnapping of words, kidnapping of ideas, fraud, and literary theft.”(Roig, 2003, p. 3). Gu and Brooks (2008) “tried to explore the complexity of the notion of Plagiarism from socio-cultural and psychological perspectives and suggest that learning to write in an unfamiliar academic discourse requires, at the deepest level, the students' cultural appropriation of their conceptual understanding of the way of writing and the meaning of using the literature to develop their written argumentation”. Garner (2011) “discussed about various commercial and free plagiarism detection tool that helps in combating unethical publications by detecting Plagiarism”. “Several library web sites are devoted to solution of the issues pertaining to Plagiarism by comparing them against each other in intended audience and approach in each site.” (Maxymuk, 2006). Penders (2018) “discussed the moral status of an act of research misconduct and explained that from a positivist view, plagiarism affects trust in science but not the content of the scientific corpus, whereas from a constructivist point of view both are at stake.”
“There is a rising trend in social media activity measured by the frequency of contributions and the number of people involved. It is becoming increasingly important to use social media platforms to proactively draw attention to research, that is, advertise it.”(Tunger et al., 2018). Altmetrics is a type of metric that is used to quantify online attention received by a publication on various academic and non-academic social networking sites and other platforms such as Blogs, Media channels, and newspapers, Patents, etc., by studying how many times an article has been tweeted, viewed, mentioned, commented on, shared, cited in Wikipedia, blogged about, and so on. “Altmetrics are collected and analyzed for various purposes ranging from early impact assessment to measuring correlations between altmetrics and citations.” (Priem et al. 2011). “Altmetrics has become a popular metric because of its potential advantages as it offers a more nuanced understanding of impact, showing us which scholarly products are read, discussed, saved, and recommended as well as cited, gathering the evidence of impact in days instead of years.”(Piwowar, 2013). “Altmetrics track the life of each paper after it has been published and better understand how it is read and used.”(Crotty, 2014). “Altmetrics normally are early available and allow to assess the social impact of scholarly outputs, almost at real-time.”(Melero, 2015). Altmetric study provides an alternative way in addition to the conventional scientific metric, for measuring the impact of scholarly research outputs on the social web in the form of the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS). “The AAS represents a weighted count of the amount of attention for research output from various sources.”(Elmore, 2018).