plagiarism
gregladen | November 29, 2011The blog post you are looking for has moved TO THIS LOCATION.
stoat | June 2, 2011[May 26th: Pulled to the top to update with the Nature editorial which, as well as noting the paper being pulled, also notes the mysteriously dilatory George Mason University investigation.
June 3rd: And pulled again, since Science have a piece on the actual retraction, and again note the GMU lack-of-progress.]
Well, this is exciting: Climate study gets pulled after charges of plagiarism says USA today:
Evidence of plagiarism and complaints about the peer-review process have led a statistics journal to retract a federally funded study that condemned scientific support for global warming...…
tlambert | September 19, 2010Not only was the Wegman report plagiarised, three of Wegman's PhD students committed plagiarism in their theses. Deep Climate has the report.
jstemwedel | April 27, 2010As we creep toward the end of the spring semester, I noticed a story at Inside Higher Ed about a commencement address gone wrong:
Connecticut College is having a painful examination of last year's student speech.
The student newspaper, The College Voice, revealed that the student speaker's talk featured considerable material that came from a 2008 commencement address at Duke University by the author Barbara Kingsolver -- a talk that turns up on some lists of the best commencement talks ever. While the college has known about the plagiarism for months, the incident was not revealed until this…
jstemwedel | March 31, 2010
Especially in student papers, plagiarism is an issue that it seems just won't go away. However, instructors cannot just give up and permit plagiarism without giving up most of their pedagogical goals and ideals. As tempting a behavior as this may be (at least to some students, if not to all), it is our duty to smack it down.
Is there any effective way to deliver a preemptive smackdown to student plagiarists? That's the question posed by a piece of research, "Is There an Effective Approach to Deterring Students from Plagiarizing?" by Lidija Bilic-Zulle, Josip Azman, Vedran Frkovic, and…
jstemwedel | March 27, 2010
Science is supposed to be a project centered on building a body of reliable knowledge about the universe and how various pieces of it work. This means that the researchers contributing to this body of knowledge -- for example, by submitting manuscripts to peer reviewed scientific journals -- are supposed to be honest and accurate in what they report. They are not supposed to make up their data, or adjust it to fit the conclusion they were hoping the data would support. Without this commitment, science turns into creative writing with more graphs and less character development.
Because the…
jstemwedel | February 20, 2010MommyProf wonders whether some of the goings on in her department are ethical. She presents two cases. I'm going to look at them in reverse order.
Case 2: Faculty member is tenure-track and he and I have collaborated on a paper. He was supposed to work on the literature, and sends me a literature review. It reads a little strangely to me, and I check the properties and find that it was actually written by an undergraduate in one of his classes. I write back to him and ask if that undergrad should be an author on the paper, since it would be a fairly major contribution, and he says yes, he…
razib | February 15, 2010Another instance of a really dumb plagiarist, from The New York Times Corrections:
In a number of business articles in The Times over the past year, and in posts on the DealBook blog on NYTimes.com, a Times reporter appears to have improperly appropriated wording and passages published by other news organizations.
The reporter, Zachery Kouwe, reused language from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and other sources without attribution or acknowledgment.
You work for The New York Times, and you plagiarize from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, etc.? Seriously. Dude even paid for J-school. Am I…
razib | February 12, 2010Over at Slate Jack Shafer talks about Gerald Posner's plagiarism. Weirdly Posner seems to be positing an "efficient markets" model of why he couldn't be a plagiarist:
Clearly, if I were a serial plagiarizer, I would have scanned my own drafts with such [plagiarism detection] software before submitting to the Beast.
The Ben Domenech case actually shows that yes, internet-age plagiarists can be pathologically dumb. There are plenty of cases of small-time plagiarists; my friend Randall Parker of FuturePundit was pointed to another blogger who was copying his posts almost verbatim. Small potatoes…
pontiff | February 12, 2010In the New York Times today there is an interesting article about Helene Hegemann whose debut novel, "Axolotl Roadkill," drew wide praise. You know this story: turns out that the book contains plagiarized passages (plagiarism: check, sales rising: check.) What I find fascinating about the story, however, is not this rehash of a tried and true marketing tactic, but Ms. Hegemann's defense of herself, summarized in this quote:
"There's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity," said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.
Why do I love this…
jstemwedel | November 25, 2009I received an email from reader Doug Blank (who gave me permission to share it here and to identify him by name) about a perplexing situation:
Janet,
I thought I'd solicit your advice. Recently, I found an instance of parts of my thesis appearing in a journal article, and of the paper being presented at a conference. In fact, further exploration revealed that it had won a best paper prize! Why don't I feel proud...
I've sent the following letter to the one and only email address that I found on the journal's website, almost three weeks ago, but haven't heard anything. I tried contacting the…
ddobbs | July 9, 2009Both Mind Hacks and Jonah Lehrer took interesting note -- Jonah's the longer, and a pretty nice summary itself -- of the fascinating NY Times piece on ultramarathoner Diane Van Deren, who began running long distances after brain surgery removed much of her right temporal lobe. This gave her a great advantage: the lack of memory of the run behind her, and thus of any dread of the punishment still to come. Downside: significant memory problems, and she can't read a map.
Speaking of memory ...
Newsweek has a good piece on unconscious plagiarism -- that is, how genuine lapses in "source memory…