related
Guide:
Plagiarism
&
Intellectual Property
related
Notes:
Essay Mills
Ghosting
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This
note highlights some incidents of plagiarism in academic
and other writing over the past three hundred years.
It covers -
It
supplements discussion
of
issues, consequences and responses to plagiarism.
introduction
As that discussion indicated, plagiarism - or accusations
that it has occurred - is not restricted to undergraduates,
the humanities or sciences.
From the perspective of reputation management such accusations
are of interest because they can serve to set the dogs
on the hunt, with an author's work being examined and
in some instances found to embody recurrent acts of 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from an unpublished work by Canadian feminist Florence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.
literature
Self-conscious Literature is founded on aspirations of
originality and quality. It is thus uncommon to encounter
instances of substantial plagiarism in major works. In
recent years appropriation has indeed been shrugged off
as a witty pastiche, homage or deconstruction of archaic
notions such as 'the author'.
It appears, however, to be more common in works that have
been produced on an industrial or conveyor belt basis,
for example in thrillers (especially where the writing
is subcontracted to ghosts)
and bodice-rippers.
Ana Rosa Quintana's Sabor a Hiel supposedly featured
chunks of Ángeles Mastretta, Danielle Steel and
Colleen McCullough.
Germany novelist Frank Schätzing was accused in 2005
of lifting chunks of his bestseller Der Schwarm
- promoted as a "gripping ecological thriller"
- from text by marine biologist Thomas Orthmann on the
scientific website www.ozeane.de. Orthmann demanded €15,000
in compensation from Schätzing.
In 2005 critics revealed that elements of The Bear
Bryant Funeral Train (Uni of Georgia Press) by Brad
Vice had been lifted from Carl Carmer's 1934 Stars
Fell on Alabama and from , Jim Dent's The Junction
Boys (New York: St Martins Press 2000). Vice has
a doctorate and is professor of English Lit, so observers
were apparently underwhelmed by his comment that the plagiarism
was attributable to "ignorance concerning the principles
of fair use". Carmer's publisher commented "This
seems a flagrant case, intentional and indefensible, with
the feeble efforts to alter the original all the more
blatant evidence of unacknowledged borrowing"; Vice's
publisher recalled and pulped he offending volume.
cookery
Plagiarism by cookery authors illustrates expectations
about practice - "everyone does it and always has"
- uncertainties about acknowledgement. Few recipes are
truly original; citation of who provided the concept or
the expression are perhaps just as rare. It is unusual
to see an acknowledgement on a recipe by recipe basis
and many books, including those by well-known authors,
simply omit any reference to writing by predecessors.
Jennifer Stead revealed that famous cookery author Hannah
Glasse in The Whole Art of Cookery Made Plain and
Easy (1747) plagiarised the earlier cookbook The
Whole Duty of a Woman, and others. Fiona Lucraft
exposed John Farley for having appropriated some 795 of
the 800 recipes in The London Art of Cookery
(1807). Elizabeth David noted that Isabella Beeton's Book
of Household Management was substantially lifted
from Modern Cookery for Private Families by Eliza
Acton (1799-1859) and Maria Rundell's A New System
of Domestic Cookery. Lucy Lethbridge comments that
In
fact, Isabella Beeton had shamelessly snipped, clipped,
cut and lifted not only from Acton but also from Alexis
Soyer, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Antonin Carême
and many others. All it took was some tweaking and rearranging
of the originals and a journalist in her mid-twenties
could convey in print the brisk yet kindly voice of
a matronly, middle-aged woman who ranged over her subjects
with the authority that came from years of experience.
Nicola
Humble's Culinary Pleasures: Cook Books & the
Transformation of British Cuisine (London: Faber
2005) suggests that Beeton's heirs have followed her example.
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.
A discussion of Essay Mills
features elsewhere on this site.
politics
US Senator Joseph Biden made an unscheduled exit from
the 1988 presidential race after discovery that he had
"borrowed" much of a speech from UK politician Neil Kinnock,
echoing the practice 150 years earlier of future Tory
PM Disraeli. Biden was subsequently accused of lifting
words from speeches by Robert Kennedy.
A 2005 speech by controversial US politician Jim Gibbons
was built around borrowings from a 2003 address by Alabama
Auditor Beth Chapman, including a call for
those
liberal, tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, hippie,
tie-dyed liberals to go make their movies and music
and whine somewhere else.
In the US debate about online plagiarism is a central
feature of the ongoing cultural wars, with jeremiads about
cheating by schoolkids and exposes that luminaries such
as Martin Luther King or John F Kennedy 'lifted' major
parts of their publications.
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