Comments on: The Institutional Economics of Plagiarism

By: Payday Loans

Payday Loans — Mon, 27 Dec 2004 00:53:30 +0000

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By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Fri, 24 Dec 2004 09:39:33 +0000

Independent journalism, held to some reasonable standards of accountability. Blogs should be part of the process, particularly as most fields develop bloggers of some note. Independent web publications like http://www.historynewsnetwork.org can do a great deal to accumulate and archive and monitor situations with relatively low costs. What it takes is a critical mass (and that mass is pretty small, actually) of members of a field who are determined to address the problem and a few people willing to stand up and say “this is the evidence” It’s not perfect, but it’s a long way better than handwringing and delegating the job to quasi-guild institutions (which have largely abandoned it as too great a liability, anyway)

By: Zaoem

Zaoem — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 09:01:46 +0000

Basically what we need is the academic version of the “better business bureau.” Should be possible to get an NSF grant for the start-up costs?

By: Kenny Easwaran

Kenny Easwaran — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 07:45:08 +0000

When you mentioned “one actor [who] is an “honest broker” of information about who has behaved badly and who hasn’t”, I immediately thought of Brian Leiter for the discipline of philosophy. And of course he would be completely wrong for this role for all sorts of reasons. Even though he is a centralized source that a large number of people read and is generally regarded as giving fairly accurate information (though accuracy isn’t the major issue with the sorts of things his blog tends to be composed of these days).

By: Nicholas Packwood

Nicholas Packwood — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 03:24:10 +0000

This is all interesting… Some thoughts. I would like to see the notions of “truth” and “communication” problematized here. Certainly there is room for dispute over the generation of ideas and particularly in collaborative research contexts. I am also uneasy at the idea of some broker reducing the signal/noise ratio in some transparent ideal of communicative interaction. Finally, malicious gossip may be a better weapon of the scoundrel than the person seeking to use it as a form of redress. I point to retaliatory negative eBay feedback as a source of many, many examples.

By: eudoxis

eudoxis — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 00:54:53 +0000

“…and the worst plagiarism is not copying off some web-site but stealing other scholars’ ideas and/or empirical material before they publish it…” My husband and I have both had very unpleasant experiences with this, and there is little recourse, least of all “truthful malicious gossip”. In the sciences, where many ideas are patentable, there is a great incentive to “scoop”. The person with the greates interest in a malicious gossip retribution may be the only person doing so. We found it very useful to sign and notarize our ideas as soon as they were hatched.

By: cw

cw — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 22:01:40 +0000

There are limits to the informal network here. Someone in my field has been sending out anonymous emails accusing several authors of stealing an idea without citation. It’s the sort of idea that lots of people could (and have) come to independently, but someone’s been bent on retribution for not being cited. It’s been a bit unpleasant for one of the attacked authors just starting their career.

By: Jason Kuznicki

Jason Kuznicki — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 20:44:06 +0000

“if only we had an effective means of spreading truthful malicious (as opposed to untruthful malicious) gossip about who has plagiarized.” How about blogs?

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 19:19:50 +0000

I have to think that Google’s recent commitment to scan into the net the contents of several major libraries is going to have some impact on plagiarism; There’s nothing quite like the certainty of being caught to deter.