Every year or two there's a plagiarism scandal that makes the front page. The latest one concerns some stuff written a long time ago by Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University.
I am, as usual, unimpressed. With only occasional exceptions, these things are always the same: the culprit has been caught taking a sentence here and there from another source with only light rephrasing. Sometimes it's not even a whole sentence. It's never more than a short paragraph.
Who cares? Sure, it's a little lazy, but that's about it. In Gay's case it amounts to maybe a dozen phrases or sentences out of hundreds of pages, most of them technical descriptions of survey results. There are no stolen ideas or wholesale ripoffs. And none of the supposed victims seems to care except for Carol Swain, who wrote an aggrieved op-ed mostly about the fact that she felt insufficiently kowtowed to. "When one follows in the footsteps of a more senior scholar, one is expected to acknowledge the latter’s contribution to the field," she says as a warmup, before complaining that Gay is just another mediocre affirmative action hire.
But Swain is a crazy person who hates the left these days, so what do you expect? The actual plagiarism of Swain's work is minuscule and meaningless, as it almost always is. As Jo Guldi explains, a big part of this is basically an abuse of technology:
New technology makes possible an expanded definition of plagiarism that does not match our concern with misappropriating ideas.... Computers can search out every five word overlaps. Does it matter?... The technology of text mining can be used to destroy the career of any scholar at any time. The offense can be so trivial as to be meaningless in the line of argumentation on which the scholar works. The tech can be leveled against a dissertation, like Gay’s, that was composed before plagiarized software was even available. No matter. If you take a moral stand and others dislike you or are jealous of you, they will use these arguments to destroy your career.
Now, this is just me. I know that academics have their own standards, and that's fine. Nonetheless, I don't think very many of these cases pass a common-sense test for stealing work, and I wish we could all knock it off.
POSTSCRIPT: For an example of a real case of plagiarism, check out The Book of Animal Secrets, by USC oncologist David Agus. "It’s very bad," says Elisabeth Bik, a scientific integrity consultant. "The examples I’m looking at look like literally copy-paste jobs." Among many other things, it turns out Agus copied verbatim big chunks of a blog post titled “The Ten Craziest Facts You Should Know About A Giraffe.” Now that's plagiarism. If you're going to do it, you might as well do it right and then blame your researchers if you get caught.
I caught myself plagiarizing once.
It was a specification for a bit of software we were working on. It was an area I'd been working in for a while and had been reading academic works on the general topic for a few months. I was more or less taking a very general approach to solving a particular class of problems and tailoring it for a very specific use case.
Anyway, I came back to my spec a while after we'd finished stuff, I was chasing some weird behavior the software sometimes exhibited and trying to figure out what to do about it. I read a line (of my own writing) that tripped a memory, and searched my little archive of stuff related to this project for it. Sure enough, that exact sentence appeared in a paper I read in the run-up.
I certainly didn't intend to "steal" it, wasn't even aware of doing so when I wrote it. It wasn't anything special, other than a fairly clear way to express the thought. But there you go.
I suspect we'll find out how much that happens in the wild, as various jealous assholes weaponize such things against each other. Yay, progress.
I've run against generic descriptions that almost everyone uses in a given field, typically included to bring people from other areas up to speed, and run into the issue of how to properly cite it. Good review articles can help with the citation, though directly quoting one is frowned upon.
The examples I saw weren't even plagiarism. Arguably they were technically flawed citations, but the attribution of the content of the passages in question to another scholar was plain.
The bigger question, to which I guess the answer is drearily familiar, is why journalists have allowed Republicans to manufacture a national scandal about such an arcane issue.
If the scandals weren’t manufactured, there might not be any, and then what would our “journalists” fill 24 hours a day with?
Carol Swain is a loon for sure; to the extent that is she’s against it, I’m pretty sure I’ll be for it, after having done my research.
The question for me is simple. IF a current PhD candidate submitted their thesis with a similar level of unattributed work/a similar level of errors, would the candidate survive their thesis defense?
MY guess, having a wife who is an MD/PhD, is the thesis advisor should have caught the situation and required revisions. Basically, this should have been a couple minor revision, versus any type of a major issue.
"uld the candidate survive their thesis defense?"
No -- they certainly would have been sent back to do substantial revisions.
Total - what I said was "the thesis advisor should have caught the situation and required revisions."
Having been a part of many of these, no, there is no way this would be considered a major revision, not to mention that major revisions are not considered a fail of the defense on themselves. Major revisions are required when there are serious but fixable flaws in the thesis work, typically with the methodology, interpretation of results, or because there are serious gaps in the referenced literature. These type of not properly referenced few sentences would be minor revisions, and would be caught before the defense itself.
Thesis are normally submitted for evaluation before the defense, and if there are any major issues that would make it likely for the student to not pass the defense, the student wouldn't be allowed to defend until the issues are fixed.
If technical concepts are five-word segments - and many complex terms are at that level - you're going to find lots of imaginary plagiarism.
This is an odd assertion:
“Who cares? Sure, it's a little lazy, but that's about it. In Gay's case it amounts to maybe a dozen phrases or sentences out of hundreds of pages, most of them technical descriptions of survey results.”
Gay is the President Of Harvard. That means everyone cares. Outing the president of Harvard as a plagiarist is like outing the pope as a gay porn star. People are going to care.
And neither Harvard presidents nor popes are allowed to be “a little lazy” with the commandments governing their respective institutions. They just aren’t.
“Now, this is just me. I know that academics have their own standards, and that's fine.”
You think? Indeed, the whole point of this story, and the essential reason why it’s a legitimate controversy, is because academics do in fact have very stringent standards on plagiarism. And Gay has flouted them.
Maybe you disagree with those standards, but that’s not the point of this Gay affair. The reason why Gay deserves a fast, furious, and unequivocal dismissal is because she knew, accepted, and enforced the academic standards on plagiarism while secretly and unfairly adopting a double standard for herself.
If, in fact, she never really liked all those silly rules then she had no business whatsoever assuming a job where she is supposed to be one of the country’s most pre-eminent exemplars of the academic standards in question.
But she accepted the rules of the game. And then she broke them. And now she has to go. There is no question about it.
And yet she is still there and likely to remain so, making your dogmatic assertions look somewhat foolish.
@kenalovell:
My assertions are logical. And that’s more or less the opposite of dogmatic.
Maybe you consider academic standards on plagiarism to be dogmatic? But, again, that’s not the point of this Gay controversy.
Whether those standards are excessive or not, Gay agreed to abide by them. Then she broke her word. And that’s about as obvious a firing offense as can be imagined.
It's Leo, caught in the thrall of the latest fabricated outrage. He's got no idea what "the rules of the game" are but he's happy to parrot someone's fabricated outrage. Kevin's got this one right -- in nearly any academic field there are boilerplate locutions that are part of the structure of discourse. There are basic ideas that form the substrate of a field, and a limited number of ways to describe them.
Nothing to see here, folks.
@weirdnoise:
I wrote an MA thesis in which I had to know and follow the rules on plagiarism.
And the evidence is clear and abundant that Gay broke those rules.
So why do you refer to this situation as a fabricated outrage? Have you read the numerous examples of obvious plagiarism in Gay’s work? If so, I don’t see how you can say the problem is fabricated. If not, then why are you commenting on this situation at all?
I think a fair thing to do is to compare with past presidents of Harvard.
The last three were Laurence Bacow, Drew Faust, and Larry Summers.
Go back through their writing. See if a comparable percentage (all of them have orders of magnitude more pages published than Gay) of their work is this kind of copying. If it is, then the plagiarism is a nothingburger. If they are comparatively clean then Gay is an outlier and she should be fired if she will not resign.
Well, that's a stupid idea.
Why?
If they all did more or less the same thing, then Gay is not unusually sloppy, careless, or dishonest. If she is clearly an outlier then she is unusually sloppy, careless, and/or dishonest and should not be President of Harvard.
"all of [Gay's immediate predecessors] have orders of magnitude more pages published than Gay."
That's a separate problem, that her scholarship is minuscule in volume and unexciting in content. A total affirmative action hire.
Hey, is it surprising Leo seems to get dead set against the black woman?
There seems to be a pattern here about who Leo supports or decries...
Outing the president of Harvard as a plagiarist is like outing the pope as a gay porn star
This is hilariously stupid.
The response from D. Stephen Voss, one of the persons whose work was inadequately cited, is worth a read:
Lessons from an electronic lynch mob
AI will remove our need to worry about this anachronistic concern ever again!
It's like words don't even matter anymore, if we can't be bothered to write them ourselves, right? Or at least our readers don't.
Since a few years ago I used to review Ph.D. theses for plagiarism... software like turnitin can flag a lot of text that no one should think of as plagiarism, text that is not an issue. On the title page, "A dissertation submitted to ..." gets flagged. "The theory of some well known theory name" gets flagged. Similarities to papers the student published on their research get flagged. It is hard to avoid everything that is pretty standard in the field.
I'm sure I have done what might be described as self plagiarism. What do you do when the data section of a journal article is boilerplate stuff from one article to the next? I frankly copy/paste my old description of the data and twiddle a phrase here and there so it's not too blatant. Luckily, I'm not going to sue myself.
Why not write "as I said in [self citation] , [copy and paste full paragraph] "?
In my field the journals used to run plagiarism software on submitted papers, and data sections like that would be flagged all the time for "self plagiarism". A lot of us pushed back on that, and the response of the editors was exactly yours -- why not just cite the previous paper and be done with it.
The pushback we gave, and I still stand by this, is that unless the data procedures were 100% identical -- not 99%, not 98%, absolutely no differences in version numbers of software or calibration datasets -- then that citation is insufficient. If there is even the slightest ambiguity as to what procedure you followed or what versions of software you used, then you should present again the complete procedure with fully updated software version numbers that were used. And there is only so many ways to rephrase that.
And even if it's "standard procedure", it's truly a pain when trying to come into an analysis topic to follow the citation chain from the paper that you start with, hoping no one made an undescribed mistake somewhere along the way. Good practice is for you yourself to describe what you actually did.
With these "citation chains", I've often found that somewhere along the way it becomes a game of telephone, and errors creep in. One of my highest cited papers turns out to be a review article that I wrote after realizing that one of the most highly cited review articles at the time hadn't actually read most of the papers they cited, but rather read articles from authors that read the original articles. That review article was full of errors from this game of telephone, so I just went back to all the original papers, actually read them, and wrote a new review article accordingly. (If anything, my own review article was then heavily cited for more years than it should have been, rather than someone writing a new one with updated info.) Along with the methods section, "brief history of the topic" is hard to write without a little self-plagiarism.
My favorite case of plagiarism is this one about a romance novel that stole lines from a scientific paper about black-footed ferrets: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/18286864
Intellectual property protection is quite a racket in America.
This does not seem to be egregious plagiarism, from what I've read. But we're not talking about a student or teaching assistant. We are talking about the head of HARVARD UNIVERSITY. Not only does her academic publishing output seem unimpressive if not meager, but it's compromised by multiple instances of minor plagiarism, if we're giving her the benefit of the doubt. The Harvard President should be held to a higher standard -- an institution of this significance should not have to settle for someone like this. When combined with her horrible testimony before Congress, she should resign.
It's not egregious, it's pointless nit-picking to require endless rephrasing of technical details.
And what, in complete sentences, did she say that was horrible?
These details seem to be left out.
She said that calling for genocide of the Jews might not violate Harvard's standards of conduct depending "on the context." I'm sorry, there is no conceivable "context" in which such a statement would not be grotesquely immoral and hateful.
Love your bait and switch.
So please cite a law in the US which forbids all such statements in the public realm without any reference to context. Why should the protest policy of a university campus be any more restrictive of 1A rights than elsewhere?
To me, there is a huge difference between paraphrasing without an adequate citation and out-and-out cut and paste of entire paragraphs without citation. There are gray areas with respect to the former (how closely paraphrased is “too close”?), but not to the latter. Cutting and pasting paragraphs just shouldn’t be done. Period. Your average freshman in a decent high school knows that. So does the president of Harvard.
Yup,I don’t know where the standards are today, improper or inadequate referencing versus flat out copying and I do agree that there is a significant difference. The Beacon article itself omitted the referencing parts which is in by itself pretty bad on the editors of that esteemed journal /s and /i. But regardless, if she did indeed plagiarized, and to be perfectly clear there is no evidence so far to suggests that she did, one does not need to defend her just because the odious Stefanik created an unfair situation in the House.
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