A common reason for plagiarism is laziness: you want credit for doing something but you don’t really feel like doing it–maybe you’d rather go fishing, or bowling, or blogging, or whatever, so you just steal it, or you hire someone to steal it for you.
Interestingly enough, we see that in many defenses of plagiarism allegations. A common response is: I was sloppy in dealing with my notes, or I let my research assistant (who, incidentally, wasn’t credited in the final version) copy things for me and the research assistant got sloppy. The common theme: The person wanted the credit without doing the work.
As I wrote last year, I like to think that directness and openness is a virtue in scientific writing. For example, clearly citing the works we draw from, even when such citing of secondary sources might make us appear less erudite. But I can see how some scholars might feel a pressure to cover their traces.
Wegman
Which brings us to Ed Wegman, whose defense of plagiarism in that Computational Statistics and Data Analysis paper is as follows (from this report by John Mashey):
(a) In 2005, he and his colleagues needed “some boilerplate background on social networks” for a high-profile report for the U.S. Congress. But instead of getting an expert on social networks for this background, or even simply copying some paragraphs (suitably cited) from a textbook on the topic, he tasked a Ph.D. student, Denise Reeves, to prepare the boilerplate. Reeves was no expert: her knowledge of social networks came from having taken a short course on the topic. Reeves writes the boilerplate “within a few days” and Wegman writes “of course, I took that to be her original work.”
(b) Wegman gave this boilerplate to a second student, Walid Sharabati, who included it in his Ph.D. dissertation “with only minor amendments.” (I think he’s saying Sharabati copied it.)
(c) Sharabati was a coauthor of the Computational Statistics and Data Analysis article. He took the material he’d copied from Reeves’s report and stuck it in to the CSDA article.
Now let’s apply our theme of the day, laziness: Continue reading →