This second annual volume of Plagiary offers certain choice, tantalizing studies and opinions on topics ranging from the “Mystery of Al-Sha-ar Al-Ghushash” to “Chick-Lit’s Re-Packaging of Plagiarism.” A “Plagiarism Disaster” is also in this year’s selection of papers, and even some music as accompaniment, Scanlon’s “Song from Myself”, a duet as it were, in tune with Bretag and Carapiet’s paper on the subject of self-plagiarism. Analyses of gender, ethics, and humor are also on offer in Plagiary 2007 and there is more to come in 2008 by way of papers examining such issues as plagiarism detection, campus plagiarism policies and student values.
Distinguished poet Ron Silliman went so far as to suggest in the March 20, 2005 entry for his online blog http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/ that Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash is a figment of my imagination! Some whisper that I am an ‘Ugly American’ who smeared Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash by foisting plagiarisms in his name, apparently in some misguided attempt to gain publicity for my band’s upcoming CD release: Public Domain: The Best of Lucid Nation. In an effort to prove my innocence I plunged into an online nightmare of jumped conclusions and unverifiable identities that typifies the paradise of plagiarism that is the Internet.
So it isn’t the verbatim use of others’ words that is plagiarism; it isn’t the incorporation of others’ ideas. It is the unacknowledged use of others’ words and ideas. This seems clear. One acknowledges what has gone before. We have many ways of doing this:
Today, more than two years later, numerous examples of research misconduct on Churchill's part have come to light. More than twenty scholars on four different CU committees have heard Churchill's case. All unanimously agree that Churchill is guilty of multiple counts of plagiary, fabrication, and falsification. All agree that Churchill deserves serious sanctions for his misconduct. CU's president has recommended to the Regents that Churchill be fired.
Scrutiny surrounding the actions of publishers has critics debating the legitimacy of chick lit because they contend that the methods publishers are using are degrading the industry. Many reference the incident with Kaavya Viswanathan as justification for their charges.
At the very end of August, I received an e-mail from one of my graduate students. It contained the link to a newspaper article alleging that President Poshard had plagiarized parts of his doctoral dissertation. She wondered what such a thing, if true, might mean for our university. I said I had no idea, but that the key word was “alleged.” I told her it would likely blow over. Sadly, it did not. It is important to point out that we’d been through this before. We had a faculty member fired from our School of Business in 2004 for plagiarizing his statement of teaching philosophy in his mid-tenure review documents. Things got ugly. This faculty member claimed that such “boilerplate” material was both unimportant and commonly plagiarized, and to help make his case, he and his supporters, who called themselves “Alumni and Faculty Against Corruption,” or AFAC, set about finding other such examples. The first they found was on the School of Business’s web site. The next was in a strategic plan written by the Chancellor of our Carbondale campus. The third was in a speech by the Chancellor of the Edwardsville campus. It got bad enough that the President of the system referred in a November 30th, 2006 SIUC Graduate Council meeting to "academic terrorists" who "lay in the weeds and throw bombs at everybody." However, since each allegation brought with it an increasing sense of shame and embarrassment, and a deepening worry over our reputation, President Poshard formed a bi-campus task force to review our respective policies and procedures and make recommendations to bring them, if necessary, up to the highest standards possible. In spite of this, the AFAC, whether “terrorists” or simply fulfilling their obligation to bring plagiarism to the attention of the administration, eventually scrutinized President Poshard’s dissertation – written while he was a student at our own Carbondale campus – and contacted the media. This brings us back to the end of August 2007.
Recently I served on a small committee asked to review charges of self-plagiarism brought against two faculty members. The accused had co-authored two papers based on data from a single large survey. Presented at separate conferences, the papers were subsequently published in academic journals and were under review and in press at roughly the same time, and neither article cited the other. The articles covered similar ground, but each focused on a different sub-set of data gathered in the survey, and the theses were different. The charges of self-plagiarism were based on the fact that substantial sections of text appeared verbatim or were nearly identical in both, specifically in parts of the introductions, literature reviews, and descriptions of the survey and research methods. However, the statistical analysis and findings of each, that is, their original contributions to scholarship and the bulk of the essays, were distinctive and did not share any common strings of text.
Every day students face ethical questions and choices. Frequent concerns include whether or not they should behave ethically during testing, participate in unauthorized group homework, and/or plagiarize from the Internet (Szabo & Underwood, 2004). Many factors influence students’ decision making processes (Taylor, Paterson, Usick, Thordarson, & Smith, 2006). Variables related to cognitive development and environment affect how they choose to behave (Bandura, 1991a).
The formalization of ethics training for accounting students has become a major concern following reports of rampant cheating at the college level and recent business scandals. Ethics education, which provides training in systematic thinking and reasoning about ethics, may be essential at the college level if personal and business ethics are to be improved (Bampton and Maclagan, 2005). Shafer, Morris and Ketchland (2001) identify the need to align personal and societal ethics as a cornerstone of efforts to improve ethical decision making. If ethics training is to accomplish the goal of aligning ethical beliefs, we need to understand the current status of student ethics as we design an ethics curriculum.
While plagiarism by students has become a widely discussed and researched topic in recent years (Angelil-Carter, 2000; Bretag, 2005, 2007; Carroll, 2003; Devlin, 2003; Howard 1995, 2000; McCabe 2005; Wilson, 1997; Zobel & Hamilton, 2002), self-plagiarism by academics is a taboo issue, with academics and administrators divided about what constitutes original research. Opinion exists along a continuum. At one end of the continuum is the view that not citing your own work when you have used large chunks of text from one or more papers in a new paper “verges on the fraudulent”. At the other end of the continuum is the view that it is “it is perfectly acceptable...to write up research for two or three conferences...and to get at least a couple of journal articles out of it as well” (see Monash University 2006, ‘Citing your own work’ for video vignettes describing these two extreme views ).
This is no easy task and too frequently students perceive what faculty and college administrators say about academic integrity and plagiarism as unrealistic, teachy-preachy, moralizing. In class discussions and homework essays, I have encountered students who express the view that integrity is a utopian idea, totally inapplicable beyond academia. Nineteen-year-old students have told me quite authoritatively that in the real world people lie, cheat and steal to succeed. This cynical view of the world reflects an acceptance of the culture of cheating (Callahan, 2004) and reminds us of the need to be resourceful and creative in our efforts to inculcate values of integrity that can be transferred and generalized from the academic experience to society at large.
This work is a clear, fact-oriented, and remarkably dispassionate treatment of a very disturbing subject: the sale and use of fake degrees, and the generally feeble response of legislators, law-enforcement agencies, employers, and educators.
If you watched the 1998 film, The Matrix, you know the choice: “Take the blue pill and you wake up in your bed with no knowledge of what has happened. Take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland, and I [, Morpheus,] show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” With Keanu Reeves, millions of viewers took the red pill. Moments later they woke up in a fluid-filled pod, tethered to a complex industrial plant that abruptly excreted them from its system. Then they were rescued, rehabilitated, and re-educated. They learned that the late-1990s world in which they had hacked a living was an elaborate simulacrum created by intelligent machines that farm humans for their bio-electric energy.
It may not be too great an exaggeration to maintain that the American historians of the present moment best known among the general public are most famous not for the depth of their knowledge of the nation’s past, nor the sharpness of their opinions about the present, but for their very public and scandalous dishonesty. Peter Charles Hoffer, a professor history at the University of Georgia and a member of the American Historical Association’s professional division, the ethical watchdog of the profession, has written a book examining the four most prominent of these historians in Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Frauds—American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis and Goodwin (PublicAffairs, 2004).
Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries, now in its fifth edition, is an engaging introduction to many famous archaeological hoaxes. Tackling well-known examples in popular culture such as the lost city of Atlantis, Columbus’ discovery of America, Noah’s Ark, and water dowsing, Feder devotes a chapter to each myth to shed light on “unsubstantiated, occult, and speculative claims” (1991, p. 5) and “highly speculative and unproven or, at worst, complete nonsense” (2006, p. 10). The author specifically addresses his book to fellow archaeology teachers (such as in the introduction when Feder notes that “all of us who teach archaeology hear [uninformed] comments ... from our students”), but Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries is useful reading for anyone who wants to learn more about how misinformation is propagated throughout societies. Because the author only briefly assesses many different hoaxes over the course of nearly four hundred pages, this book seems best suited to an introductory college-level reader. However, as an introductory text in a course that addresses scientific rationality, frauds and misinformation, and/or rhetorical awareness of audience, Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries offers some appealing examples that will likely connect well with students.
In May 2007, I found a paper on PubMed that seemed very familiar. One third of this paper (1200 words), including one table, was copied almost paragraph for paragraph from Chapter 3 of my PhD dissertation. I was astonished as I saw scientific omissions, contradictions, and even false statements. Looking up, I recognized the name of the sole author—none other than my former PhD advisor. I was acknowledged at the end, right next to the lab technician.