Comments on: Let No-one Else’s Work Evade Your Eyes

By: Crooked Timber » » Academic Freedom of Speech

Crooked Timber » » Academic Freedom of Speech — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 23:58:42 +0000

[...] fluent). The Chronicle also has a follow-up story (sub-required) on the fallout from its plagiarism investigation of last year. Two plagiarists lost their jobs [...]

By: Crooked Timber » » Spooks in the Academy

Crooked Timber » » Spooks in the Academy — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 16:39:22 +0000

[...] nal Magazine Award for the Chronicle’s special report on plagiarism, which I blogged here last December. Congratulations. posted on Wednesda [...]

By: Patterico

Patterico — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 06:56:27 +0000

Count me as another person who liked the title of the post. “Remember why the good Lord made your eyes . . .”

By: des von bladet

des von bladet — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 16:12:12 +0000

Henry: Oh good! My arguments generally improve a lot when someone else makes them. (Mr Nietzsche is particularly good.)

By: Henry

Henry — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 15:33:48 +0000

Des – funnily enough you’ve anticipated the basic argument of a post I’m about to write.

By: des von bladet

des von bladet — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 14:20:17 +0000

The problem with plagiarism isn’t so much theft in the sense of depriving someone of goods or property (e.g., royalties); it’s the fraudulent claim of having originated the stuff. Even the Creative Commons type licenses generally make a point of saying “Share and enjoy, but give due credit”. Stealing “property” is a thing, but usurping kudos is surely far, far worse in the eyes of those of us with negligible commercial value.

By: Angry Moderate

Angry Moderate — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 13:33:15 +0000

Richard Ellickson’s marvellous book, Order Without Law, notes that the first and usually most effective sanction against violators of a community norm is, “truthful malicious gossip.” In my experience, this is quite common with regard to plagiarists – and the worst plagiarism is not copying off some web-site but stealing other scholars’ ideas and/or empirical material before they publish it – and quite appropriate and quite effective. The only problem is the equally large circulation of untruthful malicious gossip.

By: Tracy

Tracy — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 08:24:15 +0000

Is there a case for academic police – paid for out of general tax revenues? It’s this post that got me wondering about it, but of course the main benefit would be not for plagarism but more outright scientific fraud that is likely to result in bad public policy (or judge’s decisions or buildings falling down, etc). E.g someone who checks that a scientist actually did the study they said they did and didn’t just make the figures up from thin air, someone who goes back and asks any human subjects what they answered (I’m thinking of that case with the boy brought up as a girl), someone who checks the citations to see that the sources cited say what they do say? Sheer plagarism doesn’t strike me as that big a deal, but the problems of lack of time and energy in tracking it down do seem to also reduce investigation of academic fraud with more serious consequences.

By: Michael Cross

Michael Cross — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 01:02:13 +0000

I edited a Canadian academic journal in the 1970’s. Two cases of plagiarism by prominent academics were brought to our attention, by the victims. Lawyers for the journal’s publisher insisted that we could not expose the plagiarism; Canadian law at the time was so weak that we were likely to be subjected to successful lawsuits by the plagiarists. My view of academics, and the law, was never quite the same after that.

By: Ralph Luker

Ralph Luker — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 22:59:27 +0000

I don’t know that anyone has ever claimed that plagiarism is the only problem. To my knowledge, Michael Bellesiles didn’t do any plagiarizing. And, yet, the use of other people’s words and ideas without attribution is theft. I don’t see how you can avoid or excuse it. How it can be policed is more difficult. About the only thing that the AHA could threaten to do to the most egregious thief was to bar him from membership in the organization. What kind of penalty is that? It isn’t as if membership in the organization is a license to practice.

By: Nikolai

Nikolai — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 21:53:45 +0000

I think Maynard Handley’s point is very perceptive. If some of the language used by the Chronicle was being used in relation to IP, “theft” “stole” “her ideas”, we’d be outraged. Take this: “[Mr. Tong] cited Ms. Wu’s dissertation multiple times. Those citations, however, don’t tell the whole story.” “Ms. Wu went through Mr. Tong’s chapter word by word. She highlighted in yellow those portions of the text that were borrowed directly or altered slightly. She highlighted in green those sections that were paraphrased versions of her arguments and research. When she was finished, only one paragraph of the 15-page essay had escaped the highlighter.” This may not be a worthy piece of research (and misrepresenting the archival research he did may be fraud). But reworking someone elses research (and citing them for it) is surely legitimate? Frankly, I think the problem is with academic quality control. If people publishing stuff don’t realise that it’s not an original contibution to knowledge and isn’t worthy of publication, and so publish it where they shouldn’t, that’s the problem. Not a minority of people cuting and pasting others work. The quality control issue is much broader and goes much further than just plagiarism.

By: alkali

alkali — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 21:49:53 +0000

To follow up anderson: it is too rarely acknowledged that there is a distinction between intentional and negligent plagiarism. Turning in a term paper copied from the encyclopedia is one thing; inadvertently lifting a sentence is another. The abuse heaped on Doris Kearns Goodwin is wildly disproportionate to her fault; the idea that she can appropriately be classed with Michael Bellesiles is just silly. Slapping the likes of her on the wrist is not tantamount to condoing academic fraud.

By: Andrew Conway

Andrew Conway — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 21:40:47 +0000

Even during my limited time in academia, I encountered a number of real villains: lechers who couldn’t be left alone in the company of female students; bullies who took advantage of their power over younger members of staff; drunkards who failed to carry out their teaching duties (and, in one case, ruined the careers of several promising PhD students by failing to supervise them adequately). Some of these individuals are still in post; others were quietly encouraged to take early retirement to avoid public scandal. The plagiarists exposed in the Chronicle article strike me as fairly harmless creatures by comparison, and it makes me uncomfortable to see them publicly named and shamed, and their reputations destroyed, when greater rogues get off scot-free. Plagiarism is wrong, to be sure, but it is not the sin against the Holy Ghost. There are many worse crimes that an academic can commit.

By: Maynard Handley

Maynard Handley — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 21:20:29 +0000

Hypothesis: The current rash of stories on plagiarism is not simply a reflection of the fact that digital technology makes certain patterns easier to detect. Rather it is fanned and encouraged by the same media corporations that are behind perpetually lengthening copyright and the DMCA —- corporations whose larger goal is not simply to prevent you from copying a CD from your friend (and thereby avoiding paying them $15) but the construction of a system whereby everything non-material—- ideas, concepts, phrases on up, are owned. You think I’m wrong—- go read Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. Stories of plagiarism feed into the agenda of these companies by promulgating the myth that there is no acceptable way of ever utilizing another’s “intellectual property”. While I am sympathetic to the idea that genuine plagiarism does exist (along with equivalents like copying entire class papers off the internet), what I have seen of the way these stories are reported strikes me as insane; the infractions seem absolutely trivial (a sentence of two copied), an unremarkable metaphor used in the same place, that sort of thing. As far as I can tell, most of the current carping about plagiarism is more a social phenomenon—- certain segments of the academic community feel (rightly or wrongly) that they don’t have the recognition they deserve, and they lash out by claiming that the success of others is the success that they deserve because of an idea they proposed at some seminar three years ago. The larger issue is precisely the point of Free Culture. Surely a culture (and this includes the academic world) that is to remain vital operates by building on the past. This of course means reuse of ideas and concepts, which shades into reuse of metaphors and such; and if the cost of such reuse is that occasionally attribution is forgotten, or a sentence copied from a book is, when viewed a year later in one’s notes, imagined as being a sentence oneself wrote, that’s a price we all should pay.

By: Jackmormon

Jackmormon — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 20:37:39 +0000

What do you think an appropriate venue for denouncing plagiarists would be?