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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 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from an unpublished work by Canadian feminist Florence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.
in
the academy
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.
Appropriation by US academic Bryan LeBeau was reportedly
detected through Google.
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.
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. 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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