In a blog discussion on plagiarism ten years ago, Rahul wrote:
The real question for me is, how I would react to someone’s book which has proven rather useful and insightful in all aspects but which in hindsight turns out to have plagiarized bits. Think of whatever textbook, say, you had found really damn useful (perhaps it’s the only good text on that topic; no alternatives) and now imagine a chapter of that textbook turns out to be plagiarized.
What’s your reaction? To me that’s the interesting question.
It is an interesting question, and perhaps the most interesting aspect to it is that we don’t actually see high-quality, insightful plagiarized work!
Theoretically such a thing could happen: an author with a solid understanding of the material finds an excellent writeup from another source—perhaps a published article or book, perhaps something on wikipedia, maybe something written by a student—and inserts it directly into the text, not crediting the source. Why not credit the source? Maybe because all the quotation marks would make the resulting product more difficult to read, or maybe just because the author is greedy for acclaim and does not want to share credit. Greed is not a pretty trait, but, as Rahul writes, that’s a separate issue from the quality of the resulting product.
So, yeah, how to think about such a case? My response is that it’s only a hypothetical case, that in practice it never occurs. Perhaps readers will correct me in the comments, but until that happens, here’s my explanation:
When we write, we do incorporate old material. Nothing we write is entirely new, nor should it be. The challenge is often to put that old material into a coherent framework, which requires some understanding. When authors plagiarize, they seem to do this as a substitute for understanding. Reading that old material and integrating it into the larger story, that takes work. If you insert chunks of others’ material verbatim, it becomes clear that you didn’t understand it all, and not acknowledging the source is a way of burying that meta-information. To flip it around: as a reader, that hypertext—being able to track to the original source—can be very helpful. Plagiarists don’t want you to be aware of the copying in large part because they don’t want to reveal that they have not put the material all together.
To use statistical terminology, plagiarism is a sort of informative missingness: the very fact that the use of outside material has not been acknowledged itself provides information that the copyist has not fully integrated it into the story. That’s why Basbøll and I referred to plagiarism as a statistical crime. Not just a crime against the original author—but, yeah, as someone whose work has been plagiarized, it annoys me a lot—but also against the reader. As we put it in that article:
Much has been written on the ethics of plagiarism. One aspect that has received less notice is plagiarism’s role in corrupting our ability to learn from data: We propose that plagiarism is a statistical crime. It involves the hiding of important information regarding the source and context of the copied work in its original form. Such information can dramatically alter the statistical inferences made about the work.
To return to Rahul’s question above: have I ever seen something “useful and insightful” that’s been plagiarized? In theory it could happen: just consider an extreme example such as an entirely pirated book. Take a classic such as Treasure Island, remove the name Robert Louis Stevenson and replace it with John Smith, and it would still be a rollicking good read. But I don’t think this is usually what happens. The more common story would be that something absolutely boring is taken from source A and inserted without checking into document B, and no value is added in the transmission.
To put it another way, start with the plagiarist. This is someone who’s under some pressure to produce a document on topic X but doesn’t fully understand the topic. One available approach is to plagiarize the difficult part. From the reader’s perspective, the problem is that the resulting document has undigested material, the copied part could actually be in error or could be applied incorrectly. By not disclosing the source, the author is hiding important information that could otherwise help the reader better parse the material.
If I see some great material from another source, I’ll copy it and quote it. Quotations are great!
Music as a counterexample
In his book, It’s One for the Money, music historian Clinton Heylin gives many examples of musicians who’ve used material from others without acknowledgment, producing memorable and sometimes wonderful results. A well known example is Bob Dylan.
How does music differ from research or science writing? For one thing, “understanding” seems much more important in science than in music. Integrating a stolen riff into a song is just a different process than integrating an explanation of a statistical method into a book.
There’s also the issue of copyright laws and financial stakes. You can copy a passage from a published article, with quotes, and it’s no big deal. But if you take part of someone’s song, you have to pay them real money. So there’s a clear incentive not to share credit and, if necessary, to muddy the waters to make it more difficult for predecessors to claim credit.
Finally, in an academic book or article it’s easy enough to put in quotation marks and citations. There’s no way to do that in a song! Yes, you can include it in the liner notes, and I’d argue that songwriters and performers should acknowledge their sources in that way, but it’s still not as direct as writing, “As X wrote . . .”, in an academic publication.
What are the consequences of plagiarism?
There are several cases of plagiarism by high-profile academics who seem to have suffered no consequences (beyond the occasional embarrassment when people like me bring it up or when people check them on wikipedia): examples include some Harvard and Yale law professors and this dude at USC. The USC case I can understand—the plagiarist in question is a medical school professor who probably makes tons of money for the school. Why Harvard and Yale didn’t fire their law-school plagiarists, I’m not sure, maybe it’s a combination of “Hey, these guys are lawyers, they might sue us!” and a simple calculation along the lines of: “Harvard fires prof for plagiarism” is an embarrassing headline, whereas “Harvard decides to do nothing about a plagiarist” likely won’t make it into the news. And historian Kevin Kruse still seems to be employed at Princeton. (According to Wikipedia, “In October 2022, both Cornell, where he wrote his dissertation, and Princeton, where he is employed, ultimately determined that these were “citation errors” and did not rise to the level of intentional plagiarism.” On the plus side, “He is a fan of the Kansas City Chiefs.”)
Other times, lower-tier universities just let elderly plagiarists fade away. I’m thinking here of George Mason statistician Ed Wegman and Rutgers political scientist Frank Fischer. Those cases are particularly annoying to me because Wegman received a major award from the American Statistical Association and Fischer received an award from the American Political Science Association—for a book with plagiarized material! I contacted the ASA to suggest they retract the award and I contacted the APSA to suggest that they share the award with the scholars who Fischer had ripped off—but both organizations did nothing. I guess that’s how committees work.
We also sometimes see plagiarists get canned. Two examples are Columbia history professor Charles Armstrong and Arizona State historian Matthew Whitaker. Too bad for these guys that they weren’t teaching at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, or maybe they’d still be gainfully employed!
Outside academia, plagiarism seems typically to have more severe consequences.
Journalism: Mike Barnicle, Stephen Glass, etc.
Pop literature: that spy novelist (also here), etc.
Lack of understanding
The theme of this post is that, at least regarding academics, plagiarism is a sign of lack of understanding.
A common defense/excuse/explanation for plagiarism is that whatever had been copied was common knowledge, just some basic facts, so who cares if it’s expressed originally? This is kind of a lame excuse given that it takes no effort at all to write, “As source X says, ‘. . .'” There seems little doubt that the avoidance of attribution is there so that the plagiarist gets credit for the words. And why is that? It has to depend on the situation—but it doesn’t seem that people usually ask the plagiarist why they did it. I guess the point is that you can ask the person all you want, but they don’t have to reply—and, given the record of misrepresentation, there’s no reason to suspect a truthful answer.
But, yeah, sometimes it must be the case that the plagiarist understands the copied material and is just being lazy/greedy.
What’s interesting to me is how often it happens that the plagiarist (or, more generally, the person who copies without attribution) evidently doesn’t understand the copied material.
Here are some examples:
Weggy: copied from wikipedia, introducing errors in the process.
Chrissy: copied from online material, introducing errors in the process; this example of unacknowledged copying was not actually plagiarism because it was stories being repeated without attribution, not exact words.
Armstrong (not the cyclist): plagiarizing material by someone else, in the process getting the meaning of the passage entirely backward.
Fischer (not the chess player): OK, I have to admit, this one was so damn boring I didn’t read through to see if any errors were introduced in the copying process.
Say what you want about Mike Barnicle and Doris Kearns Goodwin, but I think it’s fair to assume that they did understand the material they were ripping off without attribution.
In contrast, academic plagiarists seem to copy not so much out of greed as from laziness.
Not laziness as in, too lazy to write the paragraph in their own words, but laziness as in, too lazy to figure out what’s going on—but it’s something they’re supposed to understand.
That’s it!
You’re an academic researcher who is doing some work that is relying on some idea or method, and it’s considered important that the you understand it. This could be a statistical method being used for data analysis, it could be a key building block in an expository piece, it could be some primary sources in historical work, something like that. Just giving a citation and a direct quote wouldn’t be enough, because that wouldn’t demonstrate the required understanding:
– If you’re using a statistical method, you have to understand it at some level or else the reader can’t be assured that you’re using it correctly.
– In a tutorial, you need to understand the basics, otherwise why are you writing the tutorial in the first place.
– In historical work, often the key contribution is bringing in new primary sources. If you’re not doing that, a lot more of a burden is placed on interpretation, which maybe isn’t your strong point.
So, you plagiarize. That’s the only choice! OK, not the only choice. Three alternatives are:
1. Don’t write and publish the article/book/thesis. Just admit you have nothing to add. But that would be a bummer, no?
2. Use direct quotes and citations. But then there may be no good reason for anyone want to read or publish the article/book/thesis. To take an extreme example, is Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews going to publish a paper that is a known copy of a wikipedia entry? Probably not. Even if your buddy is an editor of the journal, he might think twice.
3. Put in the work to actually understand the method or materials that you’re using. But, hey, that’s a lot of effort! You have a life to read, no? Working out math, reading obscure documents in a foreign language, actually reading what you need to use, that would take effort! Ok, that’s effort that most of us would want to put in, indeed that’s a big reason we became academics in the first place: we enjoy coding, we enjoy working out math, understanding new things, reading dusty old library books. But some subset of us doesn’t want to do the work.
If, for whatever reason, you don’t want to do any of the above three options, then maybe you’ll plagiarize. And just hope that, if you get caught, you receive the treatment given to the Harvard and Yale law professors, the USC medical school professor, and the Princeton history professor or, if you do it late enough in your career, the George Mason statistics professor and the Rutgers history professor. So, stay networked and avoid pissing off powerful people within your institution.
As I wrote last year regarding scholarly misconduct more generally:
I don’t know that anyone’s getting a pass. What seems more likely to me is that anyone—left, center, or right—who gets more attention is also more likely to see his or her work scrutinized.
Or, to put it another way, it’s a sad story that perpetrators of scholarly misconduct often “seem to get a pass” from their friends and employers and academic societies, but this doesn’t seem to have much to do with ideological narratives; it seems more like people being lazy and not wanting a fuss.
The tell
The tell, as they say in poker, is that the copied-without-attribution material so often displays a lack of understanding. Not necessarily a lack of ability to understand—-Ed Wegman could’ve spent an hour reading through the Wikipedia passage he’d copied and avoided introducing an error; Christian Hesse could’ve spent some time actually reading the words he typed, and maybe even some doing some research, and avoiding errors such as this, reported by chess historian Edward Winter:
In 1900 Wilhelm/William Steinitz died, a fact which did not prevent Christian Hesse from quoting a remark by Steinitz about a mate-in-two problem by Pulitzer which, according to Hesse, was dated 1907. (See page 166 of The Joys of Chess.) Hesse miscopied from our presentation of the Pulitzer problem on page 11 of A Chess Omnibus (also included in Steinitz Stuck and Capa Caught). We gave Steinitz’s comments on the composition as quoted on page 60 of the Chess Player’s Scrap Book, April 1907, and that sufficed for Hesse to assume that the problem was composed in 1907.
Also, I can only assume that Korea expert Charles Armstrong could’ve carefully read the passage he was ripping off and avoided getting its meaning backward. But having the ability to do the work isn’t enough. To keep the quality up in the finished product, you have to do the work. Understanding new material is hard; copying is easy. And then it makes sense to cover your tracks. Which makes it harder for the reader to spot the mistakes. Etc.
In his classic essay, “Politics and the English Language,” the political journalist George Orwell drew a connection between cloudy writing and cloudy content, which I think applies to academic writing as well. Something similar seems to be going on with copying without attribution. It happens when authors don’t understand what they’re writing about.
P.S. I just came across this post from 2011, “A (not quite) grand unified theory of plagiarism, as applied to the Wegman case,” where I wrote, “It’s not that the plagiarized work made the paper wrong; it’s that plagiarism is an indication that the authors don’t really know what they’re doing.” I’d forgotten about that!
Curious whether this post is coming up in the queue now by chance/whether it’s coincidentally synchronized with the current stuff about Claudine Gay (currently embattled president of Harvard, for those not reading the news about it)? (I expect a lively comment section for that reason …)
This post strikes me as one of the following: a) incredibly coincidentally timed, b) painfully passive aggressive, or c) comically stealthy support. I’m truly not sure which it is.
Ben:
A bunch of people were emailing me with questions about plagiarism. Regarding the Claudine Gay case, I don’t really have anything to add beyond what Jonathan Bailey has written here and here at his blog Plagiarism Today.
Here are some of the things that Bailey wrote:
Bailey continues:
And here’s another:
He summarizes:
There’s lots more at the link. I thought what Bailey wrote was reasonable.
I wrote the above post because, though I have nothing really to add about the Harvard scandal beyond what I wrote earlier, I did want to share this new insight I had, about plagiarism being a signal of lack of understanding.
Claudine Gay plagiarizing an acknowledgements section is funnier than any academic plagiarism case I’d heard of before. Using the logic of this post, that would seem to imply she doesn’t understand how academics acknowledge the contribution of others, and I guess plagiarizing confirms that. The community is not that wronged by her acknowledgements specifically (nobody was going to follow a citation trail), but that is a case where someone being acknowledged perhaps should feel miffed that she didn’t bother to thank them in her own words.
In an odd coincidence, a relative of mine was just recounting today how she had received a holiday greeting card from her father, and (as a joke) crossed his name out and wrote in her own to send it back to him. He didn’t find it funny.
I think you’re right Andrew, it is a symptom of lacking understanding.
Plagiarism erases the original context of whatever ideas are included. Someone who understood the topic would value this information.
I’ve found textbooks to be very poor about citing sources. I haven’t bothered with one since opening up the premier neuroscience textbook and the first paragraph said something like “The human brain contains X billion cells, Y billion of which are neurons”, with no source for how this number was arrived at.
Sure enough:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5834348/
Similarly, the idea that plagiarized material can be relied on assumes the existence of these kinds of timeless, contextless facts. That is a fundamental misunderstanding that belies further issues with the author’s thought process like over-reliance on argument from authority and consensus heuristics.
Interesting perspective. Plagiarism really does seem to indicate lack of passion and curiosity for the subject matter.
I can see why a student might plagiarize, maybe it was some required class they didn’t really want to take. Or it was the only time slot available in their schedule, or whatever. They meant to do a better job on the assignment, but were busy doing this and signing that, and trying to meet some girl, and just ran out of time.
Perhaps academics go easier on each other for similar reasons, publish or perish and all of that. We’ve all had to meet our quota of published papers or whatever. If you scratch my back I’ll scratch your back.
That said, I’d like to think that real passion and expertise do shine through self-evidently. It can be a real joy when someone is clearly enthusiastic about their subject and has backed that up with deep and varied study and practice.
Somewhat tangential: attorneys often discourage the use of direct quotes in expert witness testimony. There is the danger that whatever/whoever is being quoted may have said other things that are not aligned with the position in a case. I’ve liked to use direct quotes, but am wary about what other things an author may have written or said that might undermine some of what I am saying. So it is sometimes safer to paraphrase (sometimes very closely) the idea but not cite the author. I doubt that this has affected many academics, however.
I never got an answer as to whether we should cite Copernicus if we write that the earth revolves around the sun. Not comfortable with that one? How about this: do you cite Francis Galton every time you use the word “regression?” It’s not your word so every time you use it without citation you are guilty of plagiarism and should be punished accordingly. There are probably enough instances with that word alone to revoke your tenure.
See what I just did? The point is that many allegations of plagiarism have little to do with attribution and everything to do with exploiting the easiest way to attack a scholar. Does every one of Andrew’s papers achieve the highest level of accuracy in every single citation? Could there be one in there that is maybe a little sloppy? That’s all I need!
We have egregious plagiarism cases like the senior researcher who first threatened to plagiarize both text and ideas from his grad student, and then did so, claiming it all as his own work. And then we have Wegman the statistician who borrowed some sentences from Wikipedia for his background section about tree rings in a report to Congress after being told that citations should be held to a minimum in that venue. One is nothing like the other. Yet somehow the topic of plagiarism STILL cannot even be mentioned without the false claims about Wegman.
Matt:
1. You can cite Copernicus if you’d like! If you directly quote from Copernicus, I think you should definitely cite your source.
2. It’s not a false claim about Wegman. He really did write multiple papers copying material without attribution from other sources. He “borrowed some sentences from Wikipedia”—I guess that means that he returned those sentences after he used them. Oh, yeah, he also introduced an error in the text that he copied. I have a feeling that when he was told to keep citations to a minimum, they didn’t mean, “Keep citations to a minimum; also, copy and introduce errors.” But that’s what happens when people plagiarize: they typically degrade the signal that was given to them.
To put it another way: I have no doubt that you’re sincere. Wegman I’m not so sure about. I don’t think he deserves your advocacy.
Probably, especially since that is not the currently mainstream theory. In relativity, geocentrism and heliocentrism are equally valid. You are free to choose whatever reference frame you like. Usually that is whichever one makes your calculations easiest.
I think it would be ok to cite someone who cites Copernicus though. Maybe one level deeper. But more than two citations removed is too much.
Wegman was sanctioned by his University for unprofessional practices, had a letter of reprimand put on his file and had a paper retracted as a result of copying other’s work without proper attribution. That doesn’t equate to being ” a little sloppy” and nor does pointing it out constitute “attacking a scholar” or “false claims”.
One might feel a reserved sympathy for Wegman who may well have been taken in by some bad actors who (my impression – I could be wrong) encouraged him into poor academic practices as well as participating in a witch hunt against a scientist to serve a political agenda.
“Wegman was sanctioned by his University for unprofessional practices, had a letter of reprimand put on his file and had a paper retracted as a result of copying other’s work without proper attribution.”
You forgot to mention that he was unanimously acquitted of plagiarism. That kind of matters, don’t you think? The “unprofessional” part was inadvertently using text from an undergrad that the undergrad had copied from Wikipedia. And yes, that is unprofessional.
The retracted paper with the plagiarism was written by Yasmin Said, why can’t you even mention her? You worded it cleverly to make it sound like Wegman, didn’t you? Does this sort of behavior make you proud of yourself?
The truth matters not at all to you, the only thing that matters is that Wegman’s statistical treatise on the hockey stick never sees the light of day.
Matt:
Nobody’s being clever here, and certainly not Wegman, who copied without attribution in multiple papers, not just that one. My guess is that the guy was tired and overcommitted, agreed to write papers on things he didn’t know much about, also looped in coauthors who didn’t know what they were doing. If you think Wegman had some great “statistical treatise,” I think you’re misleading yourself. Just because the dude agreed with you politically, it doesn’t mean that he knew what he was purportedly writing about.
That doesn’t seem correct Matt. George Mason Provost Peter Stearns in his letter to the Faculty (22 Feb, 2012) writes:
https://retractionwatch.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/stearnslettermashey.pdf
Wegman was the corresponding author of the retracted paper and bears responsibility for its contents. Your point about Yasmin Said is an interesting one though. What was her role in this whole drawn out car crash? She seems to be associated with all of Wegman’s problematic work. It would be very enlightening to know the whole story.
Not clear what you mean by the last bit. I suspect no one really cares any more about Wegman’s “statistical treatise” but if they wanted to read it they only have to google.
I actually have run into something along the lines of Rahul’s example a number of times. There are some great textbooks where there are exercises that are clearly new versions of exercises in older textbooks. Not word-for-word copyings, but the kind of thing where in a monograph I would consider it plagiarism if the author didn’t make it clear that they were drawing on an earlier source. I think the standard is just different in textbooks. In exercises in particular, there’s an argument for removing the trail of breadcrumbs if otherwise it would lead students to where they could just find a worked solution.
Wow. It’s been ten years?!
Time flies.
I’ve read a number of posts about plagiarism here, but I don’t recall Andrew previously discussing being plagiarized himself. I’d like to hear more about that, since he usually has the third-party perspective, like that he attributes to Sokal.
Wonks:
In this case, the plagiarist knows what he’s done, and for the rest of his life, he will have to live with himself, which is worse than any kind of punishment than I could imagine. But, yeah, having had firsthand experience of being plagiarized does give the general issue an extra interest for me.
There’s plagiarism and then there’s plagiarism. What I mean is: it seems that sometimes people plagiarize because they aren’t confident that they can do their own writing, either because they don’t fully understand the material or because they’re bad writers. They are plagiarizing as a way of hiding their shortcomings. I might call that the ‘strong form’ of plagiarism.
Then there’s a weak form, in which people understand the material just fine and they’re capable of explaining it just fine, but they copy someone else’s wording out of laziness or to save time. Perhaps naively, I wouldn’t have thought this weak form of plagiarism would be at all common: usually it’s not that hard to use your own wording to capture the same thought that has been expressed by someone else.
When I read about plagiarism in academia I always assume it’s plagiarism in its strong form: it doesn’t seem like weak-form plagiarism would normally rise to the level of attention at which I would hear about it. But this is not an informed view on my part, it’s an assumption based on my own assessment of what we should be worried about. If I found that someone had given a graduation speech in which they lifted an eloquent sentence or two from a speech that FDR gave in 1941, without giving credit, I would shrug it off: OK, that doesn’t show a lot of class, and it’s not something I would do myself, but it’s not in the 10,000,000 worst things to happen in the world that day.
Which is why I was pretty surprised to see examples of Harvard president Claudine Gay’s plagiarism in this article https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/us/claudine-gay-harvard-president-excerpts.html Maybe there are more serious examples elsewhere but the examples here seem like small beer…to the extent that I can tell. For instance, according to The NY Times:
Dr. Ansolabehere [Hey, he’s a co-author of one of my papers, Andrew brought him onboard, I’ve never met him] and Dr. Snyder write: “Theoretical arguments predict an interaction between partisanship of voters and party control of state government. Democratic counties are expected to receive more transfers when the state is under Democratic control …”
Dr. Gay writes: “Theory predicts an interaction between county partisanship and party control, such that the more Democratic a county, the more LIHTC allocations it should receive when the state is under Democratic control …”
What I’m not clear on is whether Dr. Gay merely stole the wording here, or whether she stole the whole notion that this interaction should exist. If she credited others with the theory, but merely stole the wording, then this is very close to “who cares” territory for me. You want to introduce the idea that there’s a theory that says that the more Democratic a county is, the more low-income housing tax credits it should get when the state is controlled by Democrats (presumably compared to when the state is controlled by Republicans), and you want to do it in a compact and grammatically correct way. What you should do is quote Ansolabehere and Snyder and credit them. Alternatively, you can make changes that are big enough that you can’t be accused of plagiarism and then you don’t have to credit them. The latter seems like a rather empty exercise and I don’t know why you’d bother. Nowadays I suppose one could paste Ansolabehere and Snyder’s quote into chatGPT and ask for a rephrase…in fact, here, I’ll try that.
Prompt: Here’s a quote, I would like to express the same content but use different wording:
“Theoretical arguments predict an interaction between partisanship of voters and party control of state government. Democratic counties are expected to receive more transfers when the state is under Democratic control than when the state is under Republican control.”
chatGPT4.0: Theoretical discussions suggest a correlation between voter allegiance and which party holds the reins of state governance. It is anticipated that counties with a Democratic majority will get increased allocations when Democrats are in charge of the state, compared to periods when Republicans govern.
That’s not terrible, although I would change “discussions” to “considerations” or similar. Would that be OK, then, to not provide a citation? I would say Yes, if you have already credited someone with coming up with the theory — maybe you’ve mentioned and credited someone with the idea in the general case — no matter what political parties are involved, no matter what level of government, the party involved will reward/support its constituents — but now you’re focusing on U.S. counties, and Democrats and Republicans. But if you haven’t credited someone else with the _idea_ then using different words does not solve the problem. You have stolen the idea, not just the wording. Stealing the idea without providing credit is much worse in academic work, at least in my opinion.
I guess what I’m saying is: I dunno how other people feel about it, but what matters the most to me is not whether someone steals a few phrases or sentences here and there — I agree that’s bad, but I wouldn’t kick a kid out of school for it and I wouldn’t dismiss a professor for it either — it’s whether someone claims credit for someone else’s _ideas_.
Phil: no doubt the NYT, known for its dogged pursuit of lefty skullduggery, is presenting this case in the ugliest possible light! Its aim as always to ruthlessly discredit the left!!!
OTOH, the National Review: “But the total of seven corrections requested so far still leaves dozens of other instances of potential plagiarism unresolved. ”
Or try this, from CNN:
In her dissertation, “she lifted one paragraph almost verbatim from a paper published in 1996 by scholars without citation and, in another instance, copied specific language without attribution.” In another paper she wrote as a student, “she lifted one sentence almost verbatim and borrowed other key language. Nowhere did Gay’s essay cite the work of David Covin, whose work and language she also used and failed to credit. ”
CNN quotes experts claiming the plagiarism in her published work is “less serious” – but it’s also a pattern that runs through much of her work.
I like the explanation of the “pawn sacrifice” type of plagiarism: you can leave out the citation in some instances and use it in others to shade yourself with some of the credit for the work and also give yourself plausible denial – “oops! Sorry I forgot about five of the ten instances I should have cited that paper! Dho! Pitty someone read some of those and thought it was my idea!!”
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/20/business/harvard-president-claudine-gay-plagiarism/index.html
OK, granted, she didn’t steal a whole book or even a chapter. Just took bits and pieces here and there repeatedly throughout her career in a manner that hints pretty strongly that it was intentional theft. If I’m a FedEx driver and I steal two packages a year is that all good?? No worries?? Promoted to President??
Chipmunk –
Did did someone wearing a CNN or NYT T-shirt steal your candy when you were a kid?
Phil –
.
My reaction was the similar. I’m generally in strong agreement with Andrew’s point. However I think it’s kinda important to clarify precisely what you mean by plagiarism here. Plagiarism certainly CAN indicate a lack of full comprehension of the original work, but it may not indicate that in all cases.
That’s independent from the question of whether there’s a larger problem in play in academia, about whether people (in general) really take the academic project as seriously as they should, and that plagiarism is a symptom of that problem.
I have a favorite sorry I think is related. I was working at a “prestigious” university when there was a lot of buzz created by a high incidence rate of cheating on tests.
There were a bunch of meetings to decide what to do. Almost all of the focus was on enforcement.
I didn’t hear any discussion at all about why it was problematic that so many students at this “prestigious” university thought that cheating on tests was consistent with their academic goals.
W/r/t different definitions of plagiarism:
> In both cases, modern plagiarism software was used to detect repetition of rhetoric — not ideas, not data — at a scale so haphazard as to defy the charge of plagiarism
https://x.com/joguldi/status/1738560144634531942?s=20
Not to weigh in on the specific examples being discussed, but to the point that not all plagiarism is alike. Also to the question of when plagiarism, depending on the definition, might not necessarily imply a lack of understanding.
This is what has been confusing to me. If they are really using TurnitIn or one of the other software applications that many of us who teach have experimented with, well we can tell you that many of the things that are marked are not really plagiarism. Rather, they are just common ways of phrasing things. One of the things I saw her criticized for was for using county level data. I mean what else would you call it?
chipmunk,
I think you’ve missed my main point, which is not that Claudine Gay is not guilty of something serious — I really don’t know whether she is or isn’t. I can see why you’d think that was my point, but it wasn’t. I don’t know what she is accused of, other than that list of stuff in the NYT which, as I pointed out and as you have emphasized, may well be incomplete or misleading.
My main point is that all plagiarism is not created equal, at least not as far as I’m concerned: theft of ideas is much more serious than theft of a few phrases or a couple of sentences.
For what it’s worth, I also think it’s fairly common to read or here an apt phrase and then find yourself using it later, maybe even months later, because it seems like a good way to express what you’re trying to express. I’ve found myself doing this a few times, and of course I am perforce only aware of the cases I’m aware of; who knows how many times I’ve done it by accident. Accidental plagiarism of that sort is obviously not good but I wouldn’t say it represents a moral failing. Here I am not thinking of Claudine Gay in particular — I have no idea if she is claiming this is responsible for some of her quotes — I’m just saying that I’m sure some wording gets repeated that way sometimes.
In the case of Claudine Gay, when I heard she has been accused of plagiarism I assumed she was being accused of the level of plagiarism that I think is really awful. And maybe she is! But those aren’t the examples I’ve seen. It’s like hearing that the Chief of Police has been accused of crimes, and then you see the accusations and it’s things like failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign, and making some illegal U-turns. OK, sure, you don’t want the Chief of Police in particular to do those things, you can’t expect other people to respect the law if even the CoP won’t do it, etc….and, lest you missed the parallel I am trying to make, I can definitely see the argument that you don’t want a college president unless they are squeaky clean on plagiarism… but even though I might agree that such transgressions merit firing from that particular position, I would not rate those as especially significant failings.
Paraphrasing still requires citation; any undergraduate training on citation would teach you that. Changing words here and there is not being original. Worse there’s a difference between interaction and correlation so not only was it blatant, it misrepresented the original argument in subtle ways.
I think the thing is it’s surprisingly easy to say something which is WORD FOR WORD exactly the same phrasing as something you read once a year ago in an unknown source and it looks terrible when someone digs that up, but in fact at the time you wrote it you 100% honestly believed it was your own wording.
Obviously the longer the selection the less likely this is to happen, but I believe it can be done for tens of words… Maybe 1-3 sentences, easily.
Yes it really is especially if you read carefully.
The only thing I would add is that in the case where you don’t understand attribution can make you look incredibly foolish if it’s done poorly. In the extreme consider
Beta or *the regression coefficient (Gelman, 2023)” is equal to 3.45.
The plagiarist is insecure about how to navigate this possibility and so buries the whole thing.
Andrew:
Here’s one example: while teaching an applied engineering class I often assemble a slide deck or handouts and often this contains images, sketches etc gathered from various books, articles or even vendor leaflets etc
Sometimes I am lazy to attribute the source. For a stickler I guess I am committing the crime of plagiarism. My students mostly don’t care so long as the material illustrates the concept I am trying to convey eg a Multi Effect Evaporator.
Sure, one could argue that had I been consentious about mentioning sources students could have some incremental advantage should they need to look up more details from the original source. Probably. But it’s a waste of my effort and citing sources would take up more time and make my slides cluttered.
In most cases this is irrelevant: a quick Google search can lead them to tons of primary sources. My lectures goal isn’t to reveal new research but to convey the basics of a concept.
Am I indulging in plagiarism? Probably.
Do any of my students think I am delivering primary content? Not a chance. There is no misrepresentation here.
That’s not plagiarism. There was a time when you could be considered to be flouting copyright law, but rules have changed especially to allow use of material for educational purposes [*]. And you’re not plagiarising since you’re not passing off the info as your own work.
[*] e.g. in the UK:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/375951/Education_and_Teaching.pdf
Attribution isn’t the real issue. The problem is that you are taking whatever explanation out of context. That is what misleads your audience.
I know nothing about multiple effect evaporators, but in general I know that if I dig deep enough it will turn out there is controversy over how whatever it is really works. Usually over what you would assume is the most basic, obvious aspects. Further, these controversies are very important with wide-reaching implications (think about NHST).
A quick search shows evaporation is one of these cases:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Charles-Ward-6/publication/42539867_Kinetics_of_Evaporation_Statistical_Rate_Theory_Approach/links/0fcfd50d1e23c917e6000000/Kinetics-of-Evaporation-Statistical-Rate-Theory-Approach.pdf
If that one doesn’t apply to your specific example, look deeper and I bet you will find *something* where the small number of people who really know what they are talking about (vs having “textbook knowledge”) disagree.
IMO attribution is the issue. Rahul’s example is pertinent. Rahul (apols for referring to you in the third person) very likely isn’t misleading anyone – he’s teaching a course and he’s doing that presumably because he has knowledge and expertise of the topic. He devises the couse/lecture and compiles information to present that helps support and convey the particular arguments and information he considers useful for the students to see.
Is Rahul’s presentation deficient because he hasn’t dived into whatever depths of whatever putative controversies there might (or might not) be about “multiple effect evaporators” and conveyed this to the students? Of course not (in any case Rahul might have described some of the putative controversies – it’s presumptious to assume he hasn’t done this!). If Rahul’s institution is anything like mine his students will be taught/encouraged to consider topics in a critical light and some of them might be inspired by Rahul’s teaching to look deeper into the topic. That’s really what teaching is mostly about.
The notion that anyone is being misled is a very modern and partisan conceit and comes in many forms, some of them pretty unpleasant. I went to Sunday school as a youngster and was fed all sorts of unlikely stories that some might say amounted to propagandizing. Was that a terrible influence? I’d say no – it was an enriching one. I can almost taste the gorgeous colour plates depicting biblical stories in our religious pamphlets and that’s where I acquired the pleasure in listening to and singing carols. All part of life’s rich diversity in which we can learn to understand, criticise and appreciate the positive within experiences that we might later learn are contrary to our acquired beliefs. Likewise we don’t have to be completely anal in our teaching and research practices – we can rely on a certain amount of independent thinking in our students.
So, quite reasonably one is allowed some leeway in using material for teaching purposes (see my link in post just above). This is totally different to the Wegman (and perhaps Dr Gay sort – don’t know enough about this) example where the aim was to mislead with the assumption that it doesn’t matter to copy or blatantly paraphrase other’s work and pass it off as one’s own in order to write and publish stuff on topics that one doesn’t have expertise in.
I’ve often used other people’s material in classes. I’m pretty sloppy about attribution – sometimes I make sure to cite the source, in part to express the importance of citation of sources. Other times, I just skip that step. Sometimes, I just say I found this particular slide somewhere but can’t remember where – letting them know it was not my slide but without a clear citation. I’ve never been asked by students for the exact reference.
I am more careful with public lectures – there I cite sources for almost everything. Mostly I believe it enhances my credibility as well as giving the audience crucial information so that they can judge where things are coming from or so they can find out more if they want. I suppose I think those values are less important with students unless it is worth modeling behavior for them. I will say that I am more aware as years go by of the importance of citation in public/classroom presentations – it is really only laziness that stands in the way of being more careful (it takes time to track down sources).
That is quite the strawman you’ve invented. Why would a class lecture be the place for that? That would be insane. I’m saying put a reference so anyone interested can see where the info came from.
People will really come up with the craziest stuff to avoid basic good scholarship and science…
All I say is cite your sources, replicate each others work, and test your actual theory (not some null hypothesis). And people come up with the craziest stuff to justify not doing it.
If people are going to get in trouble for using phrases from the Bible or Homer without attribution a lot of people are going to be in trouble.
Rahul:
I think a key difference here is that in an academic book or article, it’s easy to use quotation marks and citations—indeed, in some ways it’s easier to do proper citations than to not do so: just follow the rule of, when in doubt, give the citation. In contrast, in a lecture it’s not so easy to indicate direct quotes or to insert references, so there’s much more of a reason to omit them. And, as you say, students are not usually expecting originality in a lecture.
But that is an example where plagiarism, in a technical sense doesn’t necessarily indicate a lack of understanding.
I think there could be a parallel in writing where as a general rule plagiarism indicates a lack of comprehension or seriousness, but it can get kind of tricky to supply it as an absolute.
Joshua:
As I wrote in my above post, in theory I agree that it should be possible to plagiarize without lack of understanding. In practice, it always seems to go together, at least in published material. A lecture is different because there is a back and forth. The teacher can say X, and then the student can ask, Where did you get X, and the teacher can respond.
One of my points was that, if you are writing something and you do understand it, then plagiarizing is not the easiest solution. The easiest solution is either (a) direct quote and citation or (b) write in your own words. When writing an academic article or book, plagiarism is easier than direct attributed quotation only if you are also trying to satisfy the goal of hiding your sources. And that creates problems.
Consider, for example, when Christian Hesse copied material without attribution for his chess book. Not literally plagiarism because he was retelling stories and chess positions, not direct quotes. But he was hiding the sources, and in the meantime he introduced some really stupid errors. Chrissy is a much better chess player than I’ll ever be, but that didn’t stop him from looking like an idiot when writing that book.
Now consider the two alternatives, the easy choices for someone who doesn’t want to cheat:
1. Direct quotes and citations. Then these stories are clearly separated from the rest of the text, and I think it would be much easier for the reader—or Chrissy himself!—to see what he got wrong.
2. Rewriting in his own words and integrating with his main text. In that case Chrissy is taking responsibility for the material, and, again, I think he’d look at it much more carefully.
Chrissy’s cheating both revealed his lack of understanding and made it harder for him and his readers to notice the problem.
And then he made things worse by acting as if he’d done nothing wrong. In this case there was no media storm, so in some personal sense he survived. In an intellectual sense, though, it’s all over for him.
Andrew –
I’m definitely in general agreement!
One of the hats I’ve worn is helping students with their writing (proving the old axiom that ‘those who can’t do, teach’?).
Perhaps more often than not, their main focus was on just getting a paper done because they were assigned to write it. Understanding the material had little to do with it. In such a case, plagiarism would serve perfectly well. It would present the appearance of understanding irrespective of whether understanding had really taken place. And it was often kind of unconscious. Almost as if the students didn’t understand that they didn’t understand. They’d find a source and copy it as an answer to the topic question, and even if they provided citations they still didn’t understand what they were quoting. So citations didn’t mean understanding. It was only when I’d ask them to unpack what they had quoted that they’d begin to see that they didn’t really understand the material they were working with. In fact, often they’d find that they didn’t really understand topic question they were responding to. In such cases, the actual learning took place during the process of writing – often only because they had a guide in the process.
Many of the students I worked worked with were not American. For many of those students (and actually some American students from less typical backgrounds for “prestigious” schools), the understanding of plagiarism was a bit complicated. There wasn’t pejorative component to it. The sense of individual ownership over what was being written wasn’t as prioritized. The goal was to show the teacher that the correct answer could be found. It’s kind of a subtle difference. Some students were perplexed by the concept of plagiarism. It was kind of like “If I can provide the correct answer, haven’t I achieved the goal here? My own opinions aren’t what’s important. What’s important is what the experts have to say about this topic.”
My point here being that such a student may or may not have actually understood the material. Yes, it was kind of opaque. You wouldn’t really know that they understood the material just because they supplied the answer if they copied the wording of an “expert.” But on the other side, you couldn’t be sure they didn’t understand it simply because they plagiarized.
Again, I strongly agree with your point and I think yes, what you’re describing is a phenomenon where plagiarism is a symptom of a larger problem. I’m merely saying that it’s maybe a bit more than just theoretical that plagiarism can occur when there IS understanding. My example here is an outlier (non-American students) but I think it suggests a kind of pattern where sometimes plagiarism is just a kind of means to an end. A student can lend a kind of smoothness or authority to what they’re saying, or take a shortcut, or feel more confident about their answer, or deliver something they think is expected of them, and plagiarize even with an understanding of the material.
That’s not meant to detract from your overall point, which I think is interesting and important.
Do need to consider the context though and there is a fundamental difference between student plagiarism and academic plagiarism. Students can plagiarise knowingly or inadvertently and in my Uni this can often (not always, of course) involve foreign students who understandingly can have problems with expressing themselves in English. They may well understand the concept that they copy but consider that they can’t express it well and so why not just reproduce the original. This is taken seriously but students are given a second chance once they’ve been required to attend a plaigarism panel and had their marks docked or whatever. It’s hopefully a learning experience for them.
Academic plagiarism is a different kettle of fish, and although the consequences can vary, it’s often a reputation killer since it highlights a cavalier approach to scholarship or an intention to deceive or both. So going back to Wegman as an example we can look at one of several examples of his plagiarism (see below). The intention to deceive is clear – it’s not a direct copy but words are shunted around, added, phrases reorganised and so on. Why do this unless trying to hide the fact that you’re copying someone else’s text? As Andrew says it would be very easy to simply say “As described by Bloggs (ref) ….” and reproduce or paraphrase the text.
It’s pretty likely that this plagiarism was done because Wegman didn’t really know the subject he was writing about. After all he was a statistician but chose to write apparently “authoritatively” on all sorts of topics such as climate science; colour theory; social network analysis; identification of glasses in forensic science etc..
Here’s an example:
original from Wikipedia:
Wegman copy:
Chris –
Agreed. Good distinction.
Re that Wegman example, yikes. I’d say it’s impossible to find a good faith, innocent explanation. An example like that would suggest no benefit of the doubt should be given to other, perhaps more seemingly ambiguous examples.
I have tried to discipline myself to always provide citations for materials in slides, assignments, etc because I want students to understand it is the norm they should conform with.
If it might be the case that certain people in science get way more attention when they say or write something, and if it might be the case that certain people with great ideas do not get the attention when they say or write something, I wonder whether it would be possible for the person who does not get the attention to write their ideas, thoughts, etc. down in a few tactical places where these certain people who do get attention also read stuff.
Then, it might be a waiting game from that point onwards. Maybe it’s sort of like that movie “Inception” (although I did not understand that movie at all if I remember correctly). Maybe that could be an attempt to possibly make someone who does get attention when they say or write something to talk or write about the idea, and/or maybe even consciously plagiarize, so the idea gets the attention it might deserve…
I looked up what “plagiarism” exactly means or implies and came across the following description: “Plagiarism is the use of another’s work, words, or ideas without attribution.”.
If an author submits a paper to a journal with peer-review and subsequently listens to a peer-reviewer’s ideas, or even uses their words, to correct or change the submitted paper, and is not specifically attributing this idea or these words to the reviewer, is this in fact (sort of) plagiarising?
Anon:
When I publish a paper that has made use of reviewers’ ideas or wording, I add something like “and the editor and anonymous reviewers” to the acknowledgments.
I am familiar with doing that, and acknowleding peer-reviewers in this way.
To me, it’s not specific enough regarding me viewing certain actions by authors as a result of peer-review as possibly, and essentially, being a form of plagiarizing.
It also contributes to why I don’t understand, and agree with, peer-review from a scientific perspective. I just don’t get it. I reason peer-review messes with the very fundamentals of authorship and intellectual ownership and scientific credit and accountability (or whatever the most appropriate words are in this context).
I see where you’re coming from but don’t see this as a serious issue since science and scientific publishing isn’t like writing a novel where the author is likely to feel a profound ownership of their writing in all respects. Science and scientific publishing has a more communal element and part of that is peer review.
Peer reviewers make suggestions which authors incorporate to the extent they (and editor) consider appropriate, and sometimes this can involve exploring and incorporating ideas of the reviewer. In general authors, reviewers and editors don’t consider this needs to be specifically noted, tho authors may thank reviewers in their acknowledgements (as Andrew mentioned above) and it has been known for a reviewer to make a sufficiently signficant input that they are invited to be an author. Anyway, since reviewers are normally asked to rereview the revised manuscript they have the opportunity to assess the authors incorporation of any of their ideas and so it’s unlikely that anything that they would consider plagiarism of their ideas would find its way into the published work.
That’s not to say that there aren’t many examples of scientist appropriating other people’s ideas but I don’t think this happens in the general process of peer review. There have been examples of a reviewer stonewalling or rejecting a paper s/he’s reviewing in order to get their own paper out first… or even stealing the ideas and publishing them independently. But those are a different category of examples to what you’re referring to I think which are more about reviewer’s ideas being incorporated into an authors manuscript.
Regardless of whether science and scientific publishing is communal or not (and in what way exactly), and regardless of whether peer-review is suggestive or more directive (in practice), and regardless of what the convention has been regarding certain things concerning publishing and peer-review, I am mostly focusing on the definitions and interpretations of “plagiarizing” and “plagiarism”.
I took at look at some papers on F1000 research, where you can see peer-review comments, and previous versions of papers. I have quickly looked at a few papers, and saw that the peer-review comments resulted in changes in the title of a paper, addition of references, changes in the entire approach of the paper, and addition of definitions of key terms or concepts discussed in the paper.
If this little investigation is representative of peer-review in general, I have seen enough to warrrent the idea that there might be certain cases where peer-review results in what I view as being essentially plagiarism. Or at least, that peer-review might result in cases that mess with the fundamentals of authorship, credit, accountability, etc.
Side note: your comment about how peer-review might lead to authorship is very interesting to me. I have never heard of this happening in practice, and I believe if it does it is very very rare. Anyway, it makes sense to me, and is in line with my criticism of traditional peer-review, and I have suggested something like that on this blog in a comment which can be read here:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/09/10/reseachers-one-a-souped-up-arxiv-with-pre-and-post-pubication-review/#comment-885974
If you’re interested in plagiarism in other media which goes deep into the culture of plagiarism in Youtube, take a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp3cB5fHXQ
(warning: it’s *very* long, but at 11M views it seems like one of the most popular Youtube video essays of the year).
As Joshua described above, not all cultures value “ownership” of ideas. That is a relatively recent and localized concept.
In 200 years, no one will really care about if X or Y came up with some very interesting and useful idea. What they will care about is the process that resulted in said idea. That is the real reason plagiarism is bad. The concern about attribution is secondary.
Very small addition to a long and interesting discussion.
Andrew wonders about Dylan, and incorporating others’ riffs in one’s music. I would argue that you can’t do that well without good musical understanding. So that part of the thesis fails in this context.
Yes, I’d agree with that. Some riffs may be incorporated accidentally by a sort of osmosis arising from music that has left its traces in one’s subconscious.
This made me think of the Rolling Stones “Paint it Black” the first 7 notes of which are identical to the first 7 notes of The Supremes “My World is Empty Without You”. Don’t think any plagiarism involved!
Anyway, this gives me the opportunity to link to the Supremes doing a studio recording of their song which IMO is quite uplifting – three gorgeous young black women from Detroit and some elderly white gentlemen on strings all working together to produce something wonderful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z14qfKkfUV0
plenty of versions of “Paint it Black” to compare with
Some particularly tasteful deliberate uses of quotes in classical music, as judged by me ANONYMOUS, after a hot chocolate laced with rum:
1) Gustav Mahler, 1st symphony, 3rd movement: skeleton for this movement is Frère Jacques in a minor key. The double bass is
instructed to play it shoddily, to give it a certain mood. This is juxtaposed with some klezmer-type music later on. Some commentary about religion or something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQCHgnpCGf4
2) Alban Berg, Violin concerto, 2nd movement: this concerto is written using Schönberg’s famous 12-tone system. The tone
row is constructed in such a way that it makes it possible to seamleslly slide into Bach’s chorale “Es ist genüg”. This
concerto was dedicated to Alma Mahler, who died young.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCck2xTC7hc
3) Luciano Berio, Symphony, 3rd movement. This is THE piece to mention when talkin’ ’bout quotations! Backbone for this piece comes from Mahler’s 2nd symphony, 3rd movement, but it is decorated with a multitude of both musical and literary quatations. You just have to listen to this one! What a journey… some people interpret this as a (self-)critique of classical music: here we are sitting in a concert hall, not engaging in a revolution although things are dire. Other people see it as a more abstract commentary on the development of music during the 20th centure. You make your own mind!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YU-V2C4ryU
4) Alfred Schnittke, 1st Concerto grosso. What to choose from this guy’s reportoire! Well why not this. He uses self quotes a lot in this one: he quotes his film music – film music was less censored during those days in the USSR – in an attempt to fuse “low” and “high” music. Of course the tango in the 4th movement is a beast to behold!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RrLWema4tU
5) Charles Ives, Central park in the Dard. Ah you bastards! I knew it! Someone’d be relentlessly asking “but where’s Ives?”. Where here he is!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCoOqsxLxSo
Someone once made a similar point against the argument that it should be all right to approvingly quote “Mein Kampf” if states something uniquely valuable. To paraphrase: “First, find anything uniquely valuable in ‘Mein Kampf’. Then we’ll talk.”
I see your point, but I think you miss another important dynamic: outside constraints on word limits. This forces authors to condense material, and then source the entire paragraph at its end. This does effectively save space and words, but can introduce re-phrasings that might come close to plagiarism.
I was super careful in my own work, but when PUP insisted I cut the ms from 200,000+ words to less than 170K before they even would send it out, I had to make some drastic cuts and condense material, with references at the end of the paragraph. I made sure to keep the full manuscript on file, with all the footnotes, and even made that available on the web (until I left Duke). I did so because I was very conscious of allegations of failure to cite source material.
This is a real constraint, that apparently is not so obvious to scholars in different traditions.
Hein:
This constraint doesn’t happen so much in statistics, but I did encounter it recently when submitting a paper to a math journal. The article was The piranha problem: Large effects swimming in a small pond. With much effort, I constricted it to 10 pages along with only 20 citations and a short appendix. The limit on citations was difficult, and I got around it by taking a citation-full paragraph from the paper and spinning it off into a separate publication–in this case, a blog post, thus combining 26 references into a single citation, “A. Gelman. Here are just some of the factors that have been published in the social priming and related literatures as having large effects on behavior, 2023.”
This raises a different set of issues – references rather than citations. I think the whole reference section of papers is out of hand. Partially, it is designed to give “credit” (in the worst sense of the word) to the academic elite. Partially it is designed to reassure referees that you are familiar enough with the field that your manuscript might be worthwhile. Partially it is designed to credit ideas with their originators – here is where it overlaps with issues of plagiarism. The line between proper citation within the manuscript and proper referencing seems a bit fuzzy to me. But the one thing the reference section rarely does for me is provide a concise list of the sources actually pertinent to the ideas in the paper. It is almost like every paper must be a link in a blockchain, where all prior research that relates in any way to what is in the paper must be referenced. The ultimate irony is that so many papers have few original ideas.
All of these are secondary. The purpose is so someone who is interested can figure out the line of reasoning and evidence behind some claim. It is just basic good scholarship.
If you claim “Cancer is caused by mutations to the genome”, I want to know why you think so.
I got an entire PhD in biomed (although the focus was on neuroscience) without knowing where exactly this idea came from. Then when I looked into the history of it, it was like “ok, maybe but that is pretty flimsy for a foundational premise”.
Also, what exactly do you mean by “cancer”, “mutation”, “cause”, and “genome”?
Eg, by cancer do you really mean *detectable cancer* (which requires a ~1 gram tumor, or 2^30 ~1 billion cells)? Do you include basal cell carcinoma, which is by far the most common “cancer” but is really more like cancer-lite and not even included in any national cancer registries?
By mutation do you mean structural variants (eg duplicated chromosomes) that can change the amount of various genes that get expressed, or only altered sequences that change the behavior of those genes? Eg, basal cell carcinomas have 100k+ mutations and nearly every chromosome is partially duplicated/deleted.
By cause do you mean necessary and sufficient? Or do you need the mutation + something else to happen? Are there non-mutated cancers and highly mutated normal tissues too? Eg, normal skin tissue can have just as many mutations!
By genome, do you include the mitochondrial genome, or only the nuclear DNA. Because people have done multiple studies where they swap the nucleus of cancer and normal cells. The cells that get the cancer nucleus act normal, the ones with the normal nucleus keep acting like cancer cells.
If you don’t precisely define these terms yourself, presumably at some point someone did define these terms in the way you mean.
Anon
Just speaking for myself, I have never found the reference section of a paper to provide me with the line of reasoning used in the paper. Presumably the literature review does that – which it sometimes does (sometimes better than others). But the list of references at the end of the paper is often much longer than just those papers mentioned in the literature review, and often the literature review cites so many references on a single idea, that the chain of reasoning is murky, at best. Other times, the scope of the review is so unfocused that it seems more like it was presented to satisfy the egos of anybody well known in a field. Your stated goals for the references are worthy and I share them – I just find them rarely practiced effectively. (more often I find them useful for what is not included, rather than what is)
I don’t see how there is room in the intro/lit-review for this. The intro gives a simple overview like: “Cancer is caused by mutations to the genome[1, 2, 12]”
You have maybe a few paragraphs and can focus on key details like the methods you are about to use, or any non-standard assumptions being made. But there is really no space to explain all the details. And those details do not belong there anyway. The first people to come up with the idea already explained it, then there are probably dedicated review articles you can cite to give a more up-to-date summary.
I suppose it just shows that we move in different media circles, but it was odd to read this whole post, and then control-F a (seemingly) still active comment section, without seeing a mention of James Somerton, a videoessay personality on youtube whose career was demolished by a plagiarism deep-dive a couple weeks before Andrew’s post was published. There’s a whole genre of (to give a deliberately broad description) nonfictional semi-entertainment content that doesn’t really fit into the category of “journalism”. Well, maybe you could call it an outgrowth of what Andrew refers to under “journalism”, but it’s not “news” as that term is traditionally understood, and doesn’t quite have the same goals.
(Link below goes to a timestamp rather than video start because the Somerton deep dive is the second half of a four hour talk that covers several plagiarists in this space from the past 5ish years.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp3cB5fHXQ&t=6516s
Gazeboist:
Yes, Jonathan Bailey discussed the Somerton case here. It’s an interesting story.
It’s interesting that you mentioned Treasure Island. https://www.futilitycloset.com/2013/12/29/a-blind-pirate/
Wow, cool story–thanks for sharing!
That’s super interesting! I’m sure I’ve done that before!
I think a kind of opposite thing can happen as well. I had in my head at one time several ideas about evolution that I assumed I had learned somewhere along the line in my academic adventure. They were not distinct to me as my ideas. However at some point I expressed them in a discussion, and I was told that, no, that was not the case at all, the idea I had was mistaken, I could not have been taught such a thing. Later I saw a paper advancing the same idea as a novel concept in evolution.
Perhaps I’d heard the idea somewhere before. I have no recollection of how I came about it, just that I understood it as an accepted tennant of evolution. But it’s just as possible that, because it fit so perfectly into what I had been taught, I inferred it on my own without realizing it was my own inference.
Professors who plagiarize know exactly what they are doing. At top universities, they tend to target international students and those from marginalized groups. There are cases of stealing ideas from PhD applications. Universities do not care.
To argue that plagiarists deserve the benefit of the doubt when in the positions of power over students at institutions with clear policies for academic integrity is to be an apologist for the exploitation of the subaltern academics, or, graduate students. Most incidents of plagiarism are not reported because students rightfully fear retaliation.
And the suggestion that plagiarism produces boring work is comical. There are professors winning huge prizes, grants and honors for their plagiarized work. They specialize in stealing ideas and sucking up to media.
Quote from above: “Professors who plagiarize know exactly what they are doing.”
Concerning self-plagiarism I know of a paper by Horbach and Halffman (2019) who state that “(…) senior researchers more commonly commit text recycling as they might perceive it as one of the more ‘safe’ options of shortcutting the pressures of the academic system.” (p. 499).
I also know of a paper by Anderson et al. (2007) who recruited early and mid-career scientists from different scientific disciplines to participate in focus-group discussions. Anderson et al. (2007) that “There were stories as well about Ph.D. advisors who publish their student’s dissertations without giving the students credit.” (p. 454).
I also know of a paper concerning “honorary authorship” by Fong and Wilhite (2017). The authors state the following
concerning their findings: “However, the systematic pattern of superfluous authors, coerced citations, and padded references documented here is consistent with scholars who making deliberate decisions to cheat after evaluating the costs and benefits of their behavior.” (Fong & Wilhite, 2017).
Taken together, I think these findings support the gist of quote above. I have concluded that there might be a particular type of “scientist” who “(…) uses his experience and deviousness to exploit uncertainties or ambiguities in research guidelines and prospers in poorly regulated, grey areas.” (Kwok, 2005, p. 554).