a) China is a rising hegemon capable of challenging the US in 10 years (X, p.10)

rather than

b) X says that ‘China is China is a rising hegemon capable of challenging the US in 10 years’ (p.10).

or

c) I agree that ‘China is a rising hegemon capable of challenging the US in 10 years’ (X, p.10).

I dont’ think the student has plagiarized at a)—she is clearly crediting X even if she used the phrase verbatim without quotations rather than with quotations. She is not intending to deceive the reader that she coined the phrase or the fact. After all, if she had written:

d) China is becoming a hegemon that could rival the US in 10 years (X, p.10).

I don’t think the failure to produce d) rather than a) should constitute an infraction.

I’m not saying that doing a) is a good pratice or than the student should not be warned against doing it, especially if it was a whole paragraph rather than a single sentence, but I see no intent to deceive the reader.

Citation plagiarism is plagiarism. If I write “Wilson ruled out an invasion of Haiti (FRUS x XX XX)” but I did not read it in FRUS but in Smith, Wilson in Haiti then I should have cited “Wilson in Haiti” not FRUS. I’m stealing Smith’s research. There is a convention for citing it as “FRUS x XXX XX quoted in Smith_Wilson in Haiti p.x” Moreover, if Smith made an error, I would not have detected it, but readers would think I had read the original document and not someone else’s reading of it. A nd more often than we think, scholars make errors.

Note:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/793ihurw.asp?pg=2

“IN RESPONSE to my questions, Goodwin explains, “I wrote everything in longhand in those days, including the notes I took on secondary sources. When I wrote the passages in question, I did not have the McTaggart book in front of me. Drawing on my notes, I did not realize that in some cases they constituted a close paraphrase of the original work.”

She confirms that McTaggart contacted her shortly after the book appeared in 1987. “I acknowledged immediately that she was right, that she should have been footnoted more fully. She asked that more footnotes be added and a paragraph crediting her book. This was done in the paperback edition.”

After laying out the facts, I’d ask for a response, which at first is usually a denial or an excuse. One of the commonest excuses is “But that source is in my bibliography/footnotes!” In that case, I would explain how Stephen Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing Thomas Childers, despite the fact that Ambrose gives Childers “a mention in the bibliography and four footnotes” (according to Fred Barnes’ Daily Standard article of January 1, 2002, “Stephen Ambrose, Copycat” which also gives several examples of the copying involved). I’d also show them the coverage of the case where Doris Kearns Goodwin was accused of plagiarizing Lynne McTaggart, starting with what Timothy Noah wrote in a Slate article from 1/22/2002 headlined Doris Kearns Goodwin, liar: First she plagiarized, then she lied about it>

Did Doris Kearns Goodwin commit plagiarism? “Absolutely not,” she tells Boston Globe reporter Thomas C. Palmer Jr. “There were extensive footnotes.’’ Chatterbox has had it with brand-name historians who pretend that the rules allow you to steal someone else’s sentences (for examples of Goodwin’s theft, click here) provided that you supply a footnote. This is not a gray area.

Fwiw I’m not endorsing the second post. Personally, I don’t like either of them much: Poser seems way too lenient and Liberman seems a little too strict imho. But claiming as you do that the two posts are perfectly consistent doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

engels / #205 – Language Log could do a good post about whether statements should be taken as categorical absolutes, versus generalizations where minor exceptions are understood to be omitted.

I suppose I should declare that I have a deeply mixed view of Dershowitz – I’ve written critically about what I view as his apologism for torture, but the plagiarism trial-by-media caused me to feel a sympathy backlash for him over that specific matter.

Nope. The first clearly says citation plagiarism is not plagiarism. The second equally clearly implies that it can be.

You appear to be arguing that in terms of the defintion of plagiarism in the second post, Dershowitz is not guilty of plagiarism (because he didn’t try to hide the fact that he made some use of Peters). That’s fine – although it doesn’t convince me – but it is a different argument from the one you gave before, and it has nothing to do with the question of whether the two posts are consistent. It seems clear that they are not. (They were written by different people btw.)

Ah, I see: you’re now arguing that Ms. Stearns’ “in order to conceal reliance on the secondary source” condition is not satisfied. Clever. Ms. Stearns should’ve relaxed the condition by adding “… or to conceal the extent of reliance on the secondary source”. But Ms. Stearns (whoever she is) is probably not a lawyer, so, yes, I admit – you do get off the hook on a technicality here.

If I were Finkelstein, though, I wouldn’t have bothered going so deeply into this. I was curious about whether it was or wasn’t plagiarism and the answer seems to be it’s a mild form of it. The real problem, as John Q points out, is that he used Peters at all. And far worse than all this are Dershowitz’s defenses of human rights violations by Israel.

abb1 / #200 – Point to you, for showing how one must check everyone’s position.

engels / #201 – The two posts can be reconciled by e.g. saying that simply copying an entire list of citations from another paper is indeed plagiarism, and that rises above the level of mere facts. But that would not be what we’re talking about here.

His website: http://www.billposer.org

His blog: http://www.billposer.org/wp/; note Alan Dershowitz in his blogroll, how many people have that?

Someone, conspicuously identified by his email and URL, posted the following on slashdot in 2003:

I think you’ve swapped Dershowitz and Said. Said’s academic claim to fame was his stupid book on Orientalism, which revealed his ignorance of the history and scholarship of the Arab world. His political claim to fame was his defense of terrorism and bigotry. Dershowitz on the other hand is a distinguished civil libertarian as well as one who has told the truth about Arab bigotry and terrorism and has defended the only free, democratic country in the Middle East.

Give it up, man; there’s nothing ambiguous here at all.

I wonder how people would react if Dershowitz pulled out a “sweeping catalog”, said this can be that, and so the opponent has committed it.

I don’t want no friggin parallelism, there’s no parallelism between Finkelstein and Dershowitz. Anyway, in a case like this I would much prefer a neutral assessment like the one engels posted, rather than one attached to the dispute.