26 au 29 mai 2026, Coventry University, Royaume-Uni
Symposium 4 : Ethical GenAI use in academic and research writing
(to be held in English)
Call for Paper Proposals for the Symposium on GenAI and Academic and Research Writing
*Chapter proposals and enquiries may be submitted to the two co-editors:
Catherine E. Déri, Université du Québec en Outaouais catherine.deri@uqo.ca
Dimitar Angelov, Coventry University dimitar.angelov@coventry.ac.uk
Working title: The Ethical Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Academic and Research Writing
We invite proposals for research articles to be published in a special issue of a leading international journal in higher education pedagogy. The co-editors will select and approach a suitable journal after the proposals for contributions have been reviewed and the exact thematic focus confirmed.
Academic Writing and Integrity:
From theoretical foundations to practical applications
When addressing academic writing, Badger and White (2000) consider that it primarily pertains to the act of composing a text adhering to rules of vocabulary usage, syntax, and appropriate discourse markers. However, in higher education “writing is complex, quite a lot happens along the way, including discovering what we really think” (Collini, 2016). Therefore, over the years, several authors have developed various models that illustrate the act of writing as an iterative process, going back and forth between various steps (Dobiecki, 2006). Among the most popular frameworks, the one by Flower and Hayes (1986) organizes the actions of an academic writer inside three categories: planning, translating, and reviewing. These categories are similar to those developed by Rohman(1965) and Kellogg (1996), as well as Curry and Hewing (2003), who also identified phases of pre-writing, writing, and re-writing. Yet, academic writing is not just a cognitive process that is influenced by genre conventions (Hyland, 2004), disciplinary or professional contexts (Castelló, 2025) and audience expectations (Vannini et al., 2019). It is also a social and identity practice that is shaped by cultural sensitivities, power dynamics, and institutional norms (Hyland, 2002). This is why the development of writing skills by university students and staff is paramount for the successful
integration in and contribution to a coveted scientific community. In the current digital era, Peters (2015) considers that any deficiencies observed in competencies, such as information searching, writing, and referencing, may result in academic writers plagiarizing. The implicit linkage between academic writing and academic integrity triggers a reflection on the explicit intersections between these two fields of research.
The link between academic integrity and academic writing
Academic integrity has been defined in various ways by experts, although most of them agree that it “encompasses the values, behavior, and conduct of academics in all aspects of their practice” (Macfarlane et al., 2014, p. 339). The values that students and staff should adhere to have been established by the International Center for Academic Integrity (2021), as honesty, trust, fairness, respect, responsibility, and courage. A departure from these values can be observed in the way individuals engage with their disciplinary communities through their writing, for example, by using improper referencing practices. Therefore, we consider that academic writing and academic integrity are closely linked, especially in the extensive body of literature that focuses on plagiarism detection (Foltýnek et al., 2019; Mphahlele & McKenna, 2019). However, there are fewer publications interested in the prevention of plagiarism and the promotion of academic integrity in teaching, learning, and research environments. An example of this opposing view would be Jamieson and Moore Howard (2019) who make a clear distinction between intentional and unintentional plagiarism, the latter being associated with poor writing practices that can be addressed through training. More recently, this dichotomy of perspectives between detection and prevention is accentuated by the advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) that presents its own set of challenges.
The impact of GenAI on academic writing and integrity
The current thematic issue aims to explore the intersections between academic writing and academic integrity practices in the GenAI era. Arguably, the higher education sectors in most developed countries are experiencing an unprecedented period of disruption due to the rapid evolution of GenAI. The launch of Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) in 2022, opened up questions regarding the human or non-human authorship of academic texts and the boundaries of legitimacy and authenticity in meaning making and knowledge production. In this sense, academic writers are constantly asking themselves what cognitive tasks they can offload to GenAI tools (Shum, 2024), while using this new technology in a responsible and ethical manner. Globally, higher education institutions (HEIs) have reacted in a myriad of ways ranging from restricting to fully integrating GenAI in their study programs. Making these decisions involved discussions amongst sector stakeholders that interrogated and reshaped the very understanding of plagiarism. In this respect, Peters (2023) proposed the following updated definition: “presenting the words or ideas of another person, or those generated by AI, without referencing the source from which the information originated, with the intention of gaining an advantage in an evaluation context.” (p. 4). However, since texts generated by machines are challenging to distinguish from the work produced by humans, Eaton (2023) argues that detecting breaches in academic integrity may be “an exercise in futility” in the current age of “postplagiarism” during which “advanced technology cannot be unbundled from everyday life” (p. 1). Overall, these developments have sparked a polemic around ethical, pedagogical, institutional, and technological dimensions of academic writing and integrity to which this thematic issue will respond. One theoretical framework that can assist in this regard is that of ‘digital scrapbooking strategies’, introduced by Peters (2015). Although originally developed to illustrate the iterative process of academic writing, each of its cognitive strategies was later reviewed by the same author through the lens of GenAI (Peters, 2023). In the illustration below, the actions in blue are those that can be assisted by GenAI, and those in gold should strictly remain the responsibility of humans.
Figure 1. The era of honest writing with generative artificial intelligence (Peters, 2023)
Contributors to this thematic issue are invited to use any theoretical or applied framework to explore academic writing and integrity in relation to any of the following principal topics:
• The future of academic writing as a socially-situated and embodied act of meaning making and knowledge production, when authorship is shared between humans and machines;
• GenAI-assisted approaches to and pedagogies of writing for assessment
• How university students think, draft and revise with GenAI, and
• What lecturers and institutions should do to cultivate ethical and integrity-compliant teaching and learning with GenAI.
• GenAI and research writing, including writing for publication, research capacity-building, supervision practices and pedagogies;
• The ethics of GenAI-assisted academic and/or scholarly writing in the context of human diversity, including cultural difference, disability and neurodiversity.
• Multimodality and academic text production – being creative through AI-driven text, image and sound generation.
Please do not hesitate to contact the co-editors if you have a publication idea that does not necessarily fall within the scope of the above topics. We welcome a range of contributions, such as theoretical and conceptual analyses, empirical studies and policy reviews; however, we intend to give preference to empirical studies to address an existing paucity of such work in the literature.
Symposium:
The Partnership on the Prevention of Plagiarism (PUPP) will hold a scientific event at Coventry University (United Kingdom) from May 26-29, 2026 that will include symposia modeled on the format of a Research-Education-Training conference (Research Education Training (in French the acronym is REF for Recherche Éducation Formation): https://www.unige.ch/fapse/ref/application/files/5616/5779/7746/ref-regles-2023.pdf). The goal of these symposia will be to foster collaboration between PUPP researchers and other scholars to facilitate publication in the field of research on academic integrity. For each symposium, ten to fifteen persons or teams (two or more researchers) are invited to submit a contribution. Teams may be made up of researchers, postdoctoral fellows and/or doctoral candidates. The participants commit themselves to:
● Write on the theme established by the symposium coordinators;
● Submit a first draft of their paper three months before the symposium;
● Attend both days of the symposium;
● Read two of the participants’ papers before they arrive at the symposium to actively contribute to the discussions;
● Act as the lead speaker for one other paper, i.e., prepare more in-depth comments and questions about the paper;
● Rework their paper based on comments received at the symposium into a final version ready for publication;
● Meet the deadlines set by the symposium coordinators to ensure all papers are published in a timely fashion.
The symposium will provide an opportunity to discuss the papers and offer suggestions to the authors. When the symposium is over, the papers will be submitted to an editor for a thematic issue of a scientific journal that will have been preapproved to reduce any delays.
Timeline:
September 30, 2025 Article proposal (250 words)
Article proposals (250 words) will be accepted in English only. Proposals must include a clear description of the research question and issues to be explored, the type of article (e.g., research-based or theoretical), and the anticipated length of the paper. It must also be accompanied by a short biography of 150 words establishing links between the topic of the article and the author’s expertise.
October 30, 2025 Response to authors
March 15, 2026 First draft of articles (6000 words)
Articles must include a brief literature review of relevant sources following the APA referencing style (7th edition), a clear description of theoretical perspective, the methodology, and research question being answered. Article drafts will undergo a non-blind peer-review process amongst members of symposium.
May 26-29, 2026 Symposium at Coventry University, United Kingdom
August 30, 2026 Final submission of articles
Spring 2027 Publication timeframe
References:
Badger, R. & White, G. (2000). A process genre approach to teaching writing. ELT Journal, 54(2), 153-160. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/54.2.153
Béland, S. (2020). La pandémie de COVID-19, terreau fertile pour le plagiat. In A. Desrochers (Ed.), Le 15-18, Société Radio-Canada.
Castelló, M. & Sala-Bubaré, A. (2025). Collaborative writing among PhD holders in non-academic careers: disciplinary variations and their impact on work engagement and burnout. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-025-01413-3
Collini, S. (2016). Foreword. In Berg, M. & Seeber, B. K. (Eds.). The slow professor: Challenging the culture of speed in the academy (pp. ix-xiii). University of Toronto Press.
Curry, M.J. & Hewing, A. (2003). Approaches to teaching writing. In C. Coffin, M.J. Curry, S. Goodman, A. Hewings, T. Lillis, & J. Swann (Eds.), Teaching Academic Writing (pp. 19-44). Routledge.
Dobiecki, B. (2006). Rédiger son mémoire en travail social. Toutes les clés pour le réussir. Éditions Sociales Françaises.
Eaton, S.E. (2023). Postplagiarism: transdisciplinary ethics and integrity in the age of artificial intelligence and neurotechnology. Int J Educ Integr, 19(23). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-023-00144-1
Flower, L. & Hayes, J.R. (1981). A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing. College Composition & Communication, 32(4), 365-387. https://doi.org/10.58680/ccc198115885
Foltýnek, T., Meuschke, N., & Gipp, B. (2019). Academic Plagiarism Detection: A Systematic Literature Review. ACM Computing Surveys, 52(6), 1-42. https://doi.org/10.1145/3345317
Hyland (2004). Genre and Second Language Writing. University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.23927
Hyland, K. (2002). Options of identity in academic writing. Elt Journal, 56, 351-358. https://doi.org/10.1093/ELT/56.4.351
International Center for Academic Integrity. (2021). The Fundamental Values of Academic Integrity (3rd ed.). https://academicintegrity.org/images/pdfs/20019_ICAI-Fundamental- Values_R12.pdf
Jamieson, S. & Moore Howard, R. M. (2019). Rethinking the relationship between plagiarism and academic integrity. International Journal of Technologies in Higher Education, 16(2), 69–85. https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1067061ar
Kellogg, R. T. (1996). A model of working memory in writing. In C. M. Levy & S. Ransdell (Eds.), The science of writing: Theories, methods, individual differences, and applications (pp. 57–71). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Macfarlane, B., Zhang, J., & Pun, A. (2014). Academic integrity: a review of the literature. Studies in Higher Education, 39(2), 339-358. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2012.709495
Mphahlele, A. & McKenna, S. (2019). The use of Turnitin in the higher education sector: Decoding the myth. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 44(7), 1079-1089. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2019.1573971
Peters, M. (2015). Enseigner les stratégies de créacollage numérique pour éviter le plagiat au secondaire. Revue canadienne de l’éducation, 38(3), 1-28. https://journals.sfu.ca/cje/index.php/cje-rce/article/view/1878
Peters (2023). Note éditoriale : Intelligence artificielle et intégrité académique peuvent-elles faire bon ménage ? Revue des sciences de l’éducation, 49(1), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.7202/1107846ar
Rohman, D.G. (1965). Pre-Writing the Stage of Discovery in the Writing Process. College Composition and Communication, 16(2), 106-112. https://www.jstor.org/stable/354885
Shum, S.B. (2024). Generative AI for Critical Analysis: Practical Tools, Cognitive Offloading and Human Agency. 14th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference (LAK’24), March 18-22, 2024, Kyoto, Japan.
Vannini, P. & Abbott, S. (2019). Academics Writing for a Broader Public Audience. The Oxford Handbook of Methods for Public Scholarship. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190274481.013.32
Walker, J. (2010). Measuring plagiarism: researching what students do, not what they say they do. Studies in Higher Education, 35(1), 41-59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075070902912994