literary
academic
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Guide:
Plagiarism
&
Intellectual Property
related
Notes:
Essay Mills
Ghosting
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academic plagiarism
This note highlights some incidents of academic plagiarism
over the past three hundred years.
It covers -
It
supplements discussion
of
issues, consequences and responses to plagiarism.
history, politics and biography
The prolific Stephen
Ambrose was accused in 2002 of appropriating work
by history professor Thomas Childers in his bestseller
Wings of Morning. Doris Kearns Godwin faced similar
criticism, as did historian Philip Foner,
journalist Joe McGinnis and Gail Sheehy.
James Mackay's 2002 Alexander Graham Bell is alleged
to feature "obvious plagiarisms" on a mere 285
of its 297 pages of text. AB McKillop's The Spinster
& the Prophet (London: Aurum 2001) argues that
HG Wells' The Outline of History was cribbed
from an unpublished work by Canadian feminist Florence
Deeks. Critics such as Marilyn Piety
and Peter Tudvad have claimed
that Joakim Garff's 2000 biography of Søren Kierkegaard
was similarly endowed by other writers.
In 2006 the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC agreed
to pay Vuillard scholars Annette and Brooks Beaulieu some
US$37,500 for unauthorised and unacknowledged use of their
work in the exhibition catalogue of the 2003 Vuillard
retrospective co-published with the Montreal Museum of
Fine Arts.
Valerie Lawson, author of Out of the Sky She Came:
The Life of PL Travers, Creator of Mary Poppins (Hodder
Headline 1999), alas experienced the brush-off
from the New Yorker after politely flagging that
much of her research had been presented
as original reporting by Caitlin Flanagan in that journal.
Rather than publishing Lawson's initial complaint, it
bizarrely suggested that she provide a letter expressing
gratitude for reminding people about Travers. Her correspondence
with the New Yorker features in the January 2006
Columbia Journalism Review.
In 2007 Black Gold: The New Frontier in Oil for Investors
(New York: Wiley 2006) by George Orwel was criticised
for unacknowledged appropriation of five paragraphs from
Wikipedia. Wiley indicated that the passages were "inadvertently
added by our author to the text without attribution".”
in
the academy
Durham Business School announced in 2008 that it was searching
for a new dean following dismissal of incumbent Tony Antoniou
over plagiarism. He had been appointed dean in 2002 but
stood down in late 1997 over two charges of misconduct:
the first regarding a 1988 research article in Journal
of Business & Society and the second regarding
the University of York's decision to strip him of his
1987 DPhil following a separate charge of plagiarism.
His York dissertation Futures Markets: Theory and
Tests reportedly appropriated material from at least
three sources, in particular work by US academic Gary
Koppenhaver.
US academic Kim Lanegran generously provided a copy of
her doctoral dissertation on disk, only to find
that the recipient had blithely used that text to get
a doctorate of his own.
eSecurity guru Bruce Schneier and co-authors discovered
that two papers had been lifted by an academic and students
at an Islamabad university.
Accusations of plagiarism have been made against science
writer John L Casti, high profile lawyer Alan Dershowitz
and Lawrence Tribe.
In November 2005 Dr Raj Persaud (tagged as "Britain's
most ubiquitous psychiatrist") was accused of plagiarising
work by Milgram biographer Professor Thomas Blass -
I
am reading it [in Progress in Neurology & Psychiatry]
and all of my words are echoing back at me ... He had
taken paragraphs from my work, word for word. Over 50%
of his piece was my work, which I have spent more than
10 years researching. I felt outrage, disbelief and
incredulity this could happen, that a person who is
himself a writer could do this. It's very disconcerting.
Persaud
initially commented that the lack of reference to Blass
was "perhaps an omission", subsequently explaining
that the problem
occurred
whereby when I cut and pasted the original copy, the
references at the end were inadvertently omitted. We
only became aware of the error after publication.
Persaud's
publisher John Wiley issued a formal retraction of the
opffending article. The UK Guardian somewhat
tartly noted that Blass reportedly had previously complained
about a separate Persaud article in the Times Education
Supplement that appeared to borrow heavily from his
work
I
communicated directly with [Persaud] and pointed out
as much of half of his article came verbatim from me.
In his response, he said he didn't see the final version
before it goes to press, and said the subeditors must
have taken out the quotation marks and citation at the
bottom.
In
December 2005 the British Medical Journal published
a retraction of a Persaud review, commenting that it was
formally withdrawn "owing to unattributed use of
text from other published sources". Persaud was concurrently
accused of "heavily borrowing" from a paper
by Stephen Kent. In 2008 a misconduct hearing by the General
Medical Council (GMC) - the UK doctors' disciplinary body
-
heard that Persaud admitted passing off other researchers'
work as his own in books and articles, described as "inappropriate"
and "misleading" but not dishonest. Persaud,
admitted nine cases of plagiarism but denied deceit, blaming
overwork and misunderstandings. The GMC tribunal dismissed
that defence, criticising both the plagiarism and attempts
to blame subeditors.
Dutch psychologist Rene Diekstra, professor of clinical
psychology at Leiden University and author of numerous
pop psychology best-sellers, had earlier been alleged
to have lifted eight pages from How To Deal With Depression
by Harold Bloomfield & Peter McWilliams, forty eight
pages from Caring for the Mind by Dianne &
Robert Hales, sixteen pages ripped off from The Anxiety
and Phobia Workbook by Edmund Bourne (with patient
names being changed from Susan, Cindy, Steve and Mike
to Suzanne, Monique, Stefan and Sebastien), and twenty
six pages from When Living Hurts by Sol Gordon (including
Gordon's autobiographical "In my own childhood I
had conflicts for years, loneliness that I did not understand,
homesickness that I did not ask for and parents who often
did not respect or understand my feelings.").
Appropriation by US academic Bryan LeBeau was reportedly
detected through Google.
'From a punitive to a bargaining model of sanctions: lessons
from Iraq' by Euclid Rose in 49(3) International Studies
Quarterly 459-480 was "withdrawn" by the
publisher and the online text deleted from the ISQ website
on the grounds of plagiarism, highlighted in 'Retraction'
by editor Steven Poe in 50(1) International Studies
Quarterly (2006) 1.
Richard Judd, president of Central Connecticut State University,
appears to have lifted text from the New York Times,
UK Independent and official sites for an article
in the Hartford Courant regarding Cyprus. He
explained that he had not intended to plagiarise, having
mistaken his notes as his own words, but subsequently
resigned.
UK academic Judith Okely was reportedly outraged to find
material from her The Traveller-Gypsies (Cambridge:
Cambridge Uni Press 1983) appearing without acknowledgment
in Isabel Fonseca's Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies
and Their Journey (New York: Random 1996), telling
the Guardian that
years
of living on Gypsy camps, reading and analysis of field
notes went into [it]. But my anthropological interpretation
of animal classification was re-presented by Fonseca
without acknowledgment and acclaimed in reviews as her
own. Other social scientists experienced the same. Presumably,
fiction writers will call this mere 'reportage'.
Okely
was credited in later editions of Fonseca's book.
Academics can be strange creatures. Eminent Oxford scholar
Peter Russell discovered a small book on Fernão
Lopes while browsing in Lisbon during the Second World
War. Somewhat to his surprise he discovered that he was
the author. A Portuguese colleague had borrowed the typescript
of an expanded version of a Russell lecture, translated
it from English and arranged for it to be published without
telling the author. (Unauthorised publication of a translation
of course breached Russell's copyright under UK law.)
Russell responded with As Fontes de Fernão
Lopes (1941).
A discussion of Essay Mills
features elsewhere on this site.
next page (other
plagiarism cases)
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