Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work. Unlike cases of forgery, in which the authenticity of the writing, document, or some other kind of object, itself is in question, plagiarism is concerned with the issue of false attribution.

Within academia, plagiarism by students, professors, or researchers is considered academic dishonesty or academic fraud and offenders are subject to academic censure. In journalism, plagiarism is considered a breach of journalistic ethics, and reporters caught plagiarizing typically face disciplinary measures ranging from suspension to termination. Some individuals caught plagiarizing in academic or journalistic contexts claim that they plagiarized unintentionally, by failing to include quotations or give the appropriate citation. While plagiarism in scholarship and journalism has a centuries-old history, the development of the Internet, where articles appear as electronic text, has made the physical act of copying the work of others much easier.

Plagiarism is different from copyright infringement. Where both terms are appropriate, they emphasize different aspects of the transgression. Copyright infringement is a violation of the rights of the copyright holder, which involves the loss of income and artistic control of the material when it is used without the copyright holder's consent. Under the copyright laws of the United States, copying a small portion of a text, placing in appropriate quotation, and citing the original source, for a review or criticism is considered fair use. On the other hand, plagiarism is concerned with the unearned increment to the plagiarizing author's reputation.

Sanctions

Academia

In the academic world, plagiarism by students is a very serious academic offense which can result in punishments such as a failing grade on the particular assignment (typically at the high school level), or a failing grade for the course (typically at the college or university level). For cases of repeated plagiarism, or for cases where a student has committed a severe type of plagiarism (e.g., copying an entire article and submitting it as their own work), a student may be suspended or expelled, and any academic degrees or awards may be revoked.

There is little academic research into the frequency of plagiarism in high schools, because much of the research has investigated plagiarism at the post-secondary level . Of the forms of cheating (including plagiarism, inventing data and cheating during an exam), students admit to plagiarism more than any other. However, this figure decreases considerably when students are asked about the frequency of "serious" plagiarism (such as copying most of an assignment, or purchasing a complete paper from a website). Recent use of specialist plagiarism detection software (see below) has given a more accurate picture of this activity's prevalence.

For professors and researchers, plagiarism is punished by sanctions ranging from suspension to termination, along with the loss of credibility and integrity. Charges of plagiarism against students and professors are typically heard by internal disciplinary committees, which students and professors have agreed to be bound by.

Journalism

Since journalism's main currency is public trust, a reporter's failure to honestly acknowledge their sources undercuts a newspaper or television news show's integrity and undermines its credibility. Journalists who are suspected of plagiarism are often suspended from their reporting or column-writing tasks while the charges are investigated by the news organization.

Journalistic plagiarism ranges from including one or two sentences copied from another newspaper without attribution, to more serious cases, such as copying an entire paragraph or story. For a first-time offense, particularly if it is a smaller amount of text, a journalist may be reprimanded. For more serious cases of plagiarism, particularly in cases where the case leads to a journalism scandal for the news organization, the reporter may be suspended without pay for a long period, demoted, or terminated.

The ease of copying electronic text from the Internet has lured a number of reporters into acts of plagiarism; column writers have been caught 'cutting and pasting' articles and text from a number of websites, including Wikipedia.

Other contexts

Generally, although plagiarism is often loosely referred to as theft or stealing, it has not been prosecuted as a criminal matter in the law courts. Likewise, plagiarism has no standing as a criminal offense in the common law. Instead, claims of plagiarism are a civil law matter, which an aggrieved person can resolve by launching a lawsuit. Acts that may constitute plagiarism are in some instances treated as copyright infringement, unfair competition, or a violation of the doctrine of moral rights.

Self-plagiarism

Self-plagiarism is the re-use of significant, identical, or near identical portions of one’s own work without citing the original work. Self-plagiarism is frequently a problem in the academic field when authors reuse verbatim portions of their own copyrighted work in subsequent publications without attributing the previous publications. Identifying self-plagiarism is often difficult because of legal issues regarding fair use. Some professional organizations like the ACM have created policies that deal specifically with self-plagiarism.

Organizational publications

Plagiarism is presumably not an issue when organizations issue collective unsigned works since they do not assign credit for originality to particular people. For example, the American Historical Association's "Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct" (2005)] regarding textbooks and reference books states that there is no question about taking credit for someone else's ideas. Since textbooks and encyclopedias are summaries of other's scholar's work, they are not bound by the same exacting standards of attribution as original research. However, even such a book does not make use of words, phrases or paragraphs from another text, or follow too closely the other text's arrangement and organization.

Within an organization, in its own working documents, standards are looser but not non-existent. If someone helped with a report, they expect to be credited. If a paragraph comes from a law report, a citation is expected to be written down. Technical manuals routinely copy facts from other manuals without attribution, because they assume a common spirit of scientific endeavor (as evidenced, for example, in "open source" projects in software) in which scientists freely share their work.

The Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications Third Edition (2003) by Microsoft does not even mention plagiarism, nor does Science and Technical Writing: A Manual of Style, Second Edition (2000) by Philip Rubens. The line between permissible literary and impermissible source code plagiarism, though, is apparently quite fine. As with any technical field, computer programming makes use of what others have contributed to the general knowledge.

It is common for university researchers to rephrase and republish their own work, tailoring it for different academic journals, and often also for a newspaper article, in order to disseminate their work to the widest possible interested public. However, it must be borne in mind that these researchers also obey limits: if half an article is the same as a previous one, it will be rejected. One of the functions of the process of peer review in academic writing is to prevent this type of 'recycling'.

Public figures commonly use anonymous speech writers. However, if a speech uses copied material, it is the public figure who will be embarrassed. Delaware Senator Joe Biden was forced out of the 1988 US Presidential race (but remained in the US Senate) when it was discovered that parts of his campaign speeches were plagiarized from speeches by British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock and Robert Kennedy.

Examples of purported or actual plagiarism

Academia

• On October 27, 2005, the University of Georgia Press rescinded author Brad Vice's Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and recalled copies of his collection The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. Vice was found guilty by the press of plagiarizing sections of one story from Carl Carmer's book Stars Fell on Alabama (1934) (a charge that Vice disputed). Vice was later found guilty of the same charge by his employer, Mississippi State University, and as a result was denied tenure and fired as a professor of creative writing. Vice then announced plans to leave Mississippi for the Czech Republic.
• James A. Mackay, a Scottish historian, was forced to withdraw all copies of his biography of Alexander Graham Bell from circulation in 1998 because he plagiarized the last major work on the subject, a 1973 work. Also accused of plagiarizing material on biographies of Mary Queen of Scots, Andrew Carnegie, and Sir William Wallace, he was forced to withdraw his next work, on John Paul Jones, in 1999 for an identical reason.
• Marks Chabedi, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, plagiarized his doctoral thesis. He used a work written by Kimberly Lanegran at the University of Florida and copied it nearly verbatim before submitting it to The New School. When Lanegran discovered this, she launched an investigation into Chabedi. He was fired from his professorship, and The New School revoked his Ph.D.[1] (The OCLC numbers for the dissertations are AAG9801108 and AAI9980001.)
• Historian Stephen Ambrose has been criticized for incorporating passages from the works of other authors into many of his books. He was first accused in 2002 by two writers for copying portions about World War II bomber pilots from Thomas Childers's The Wings of Morning in his book The Wild Blue. After Ambrose admitted to the errors, the New York Times found further unattributed passages, and "Mr. Ambrose again acknowledged his errors and promised to correct them in later editions."
• Author Doris Kearns Goodwin interviewed author Lynne McTaggart in her 1987 book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, and she used passages from McTaggart's book about Kathleen Kennedy. In 2002, when the similarities between Goodwin's and McTaggart's books became public, Goodwin stated that she had an understanding that citations would not be required for all references, and that extensive footnotes already existed. Many doubted her claims, and she was forced to resign from the Pulitzer Prize board. [2] [3] [4]
• A mathematician and computer scientist Dǎnuţ Marcu claims to have published over 378 original papers in various scientific publications. A number of his recent papers have been proven to be exact copies of papers published earlier by other people. [5]
• A University of Colorado investigating committee found Ethnic Studies professor and activist Ward Churchill guilty of multiple counts of plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification. The Chancellor has recommended Churchill's dismissal to the Board of Regents. The action is currently pending Churchill's appeal.
• Former President Jimmy Carter was accused by a former Middle East diplomat Dennis Ross for publishing the diplomat's maps in his new book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid without permission or attribution.
• Author Alan Dershowitz has been accused by Norman Finkelstein of plagiarizing Joan Peters's controversial book From Time Immemorial (see Dershowitz-Finkelstein affair).

Computer Games

• Atari's video game Pong was accused by Magnavox of being a copy of the Odyssey's tennis game. Nolan Bushnell saw Ralph Baer's version at a 1972 electronics show in Burlingame, California. Bushnell then founded Atari and established Pong as its featured game. "Baer and Magnavox filed suit against Bushnell and Atari in 1973 and finally reached an out-of-court settlement in 1976. It marked the end for Odyssey and the beginning of the Atari age." [6]

Film

• The 1922 film Nosferatu was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. Stoker's widow sued the producers of Nosferatu, and had many of the film's copies destroyed (although some remain).
• The 1990 movie Hardware was noted to have substantial similarities to the 2000 AD one-shot story "SHOK!". Following legal action, the filmmakers agreed to amend the credits to read that the movie was "inspired by" the writers of the comic strip.

Journalism

• In 1999, writer and television commentator Monica Crowley allegedly plagiarized part of an article she wrote for the Wall Street Journal (August 9, 1999), called "The Day Nixon Said Goodbye." The Journal ran an apology the same week. Timothy Noah of Slate Magazine later wrote of the striking similarities in her article to phrases Paul Johnson used in his 1988 article for Commentary called "In Praise of Richard Nixon". [7]
• Ann Coulter has been accused of plagiarism, and the Universal Press Syndicate is examining her articles.
• New York Times reporter Jayson Blair plagiarized articles and manufactured quotations in stories, including stories regarding Jessica Lynch and the Beltway sniper attacks. He and several editors from the Times resigned in June 2003.
• Moorestown Township, New Jersey, high-school student Blair Hornstine had her admission to Harvard University revoked in July 2003 after she was found to have passed off speeches and writings by famous figures, including Bill Clinton, as hers in articles she wrote as a student journalist for a local newspaper.
• Long-time Baltimore Sun columnist Michael Olesker resigned on January 4, 2006, after being accused of plagiarizing other journalists' articles in his columns.
• Conservative blogger Ben Domenech, soon after he was hired to write a blog for the Washington Post in 2006, was found to have plagiarized a number of columns and articles he'd written for his college newspaper and National Review Online, lifting passages from a variety of sources ranging from well-known pundits to amateur film critics. Domenech ultimately apologized and resigned

Literature

• A young Helen Keller was accused in 1892 for plagiarizing The Frost King, a short story that strongly resembled Margaret T. Canby's story "The Frost Fairies." She was brought before a tribunal of the Perkins Institute for the Blind, where she was acquitted by a single vote. She said she was worried she may have read The Frost Fairies and forgotten it and "remained paranoid about plagiarism ever after." ; and said that this led her to write an autobiography: the one thing she knew must be original.
• Alex Haley settled a lawsuit with Harold Courlander that cited approximately 80 passages in Haley's novel Roots as having been plagiarized from Courlander's novel The African. "Accusations that portions of 'Roots' (Doubleday hard cover, Dell paperback) consisted of plagiarized material or were concocted plagued Mr. Haley from soon after the book's publication up until his death in February 1992. In 1978, Mr. Haley was sued for plagiarism by Harold Courlander, author of the novel The African, and Haley paid him $650,000 in an out-of-court settlement." Haley insisted that "the passages 'were in something somebody had given me, and I don't know who gave it to me . . . . Somehow or another, it ended up in the book."

Courlander's pre-trial memorandum in the lawsuit stated: "Defendant Haley had access to and substantially copied from The African. Without The African, Roots would have been a very different and less successful novel, and indeed it is doubtful that Mr. Haley could have written Roots without The African. . . . Mr. Haley copied language, thoughts, attitudes, incidents, situations, plot and character."

In his report submitted to the court in this lawsuit, Professor of English and expert witness on plagiarism, Michael Wood of Columbia University, stated: "The evidence of copying from The African in both the novel and the television dramatization of Roots is clear and irrefutable. The copying is significant and extensive....Roots...plainly uses The African as a model: as something to be copied at some times, and at other times to be modified; but always, it seems, to be consulted. . . . Roots takes from The African phrases, situations, ideas, aspects of style and of plot. . . . Roots finds in The African essential elements for its depiction of such things as a slave's thoughts of escape, the psychology of an old slave, the habits of mind of the hero, and the whole sense of life on an infamous slave ship. Such things are the life of a novel; and when they appear in Roots, they are the life of someone else's novel."

After a five-week trial in federal district court, Courlander and Haley settled the case, with Haley making a financial settlement and a statement that "Alex Haley acknowledges and regrets that various materials from The African by Harold Courlander found their way into his book Roots."

During the trial, presiding U.S. District Court Judge Robert J. Ward stated, "Copying there is, period." In a later interview with BBC Television, Judge Ward stated, "Alex Haley perpetrated a hoax on the public."

During the trial, Alex Haley had maintained that he had not read The African before writing Roots. Shortly after the trial, however, an instructor of black literature at Skidmore College, Joseph Bruchac, came forward. He swore in an affidavit that in 1970 or 1971 (five or six years before the publication of Roots) he had discussed The African with Haley and had, in fact, given his "own personal copy of The African to Mr. Haley."

• Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, has been twice accused of plagiarism resulting in lawsuits, but both suits were ultimately dismissed.
  • Brown was accused of "appropriating the architecture" of the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. A British judge dismissed the copyright infringement claim in April 2006, on the grounds that the earlier book claims to be non-fictional.
  • Additionally, Brown was accused by novelist Lewis Perdue for plagiarizing his novels The Da Vinci Legacy (1983) and Daughter of God (2000). A U.S. judge dismissed the case in August 2005.
• Kaavya Viswanathan's first novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life is reported to contain plagiarized passages from at least five other novels. All editions of the book were subsequently withdrawn, her publishing deal with Little, Brown and Co. was rescinded, and a film deal with Dreamworks SKG was cancelled.

Music

• George Harrison was successfully sued in a prolonged suit that began in 1971 for plagiarizing the Chiffons' "He's So Fine" for the melody of his own "My Sweet Lord." [8]
• In early 2007, Timbaland was alleged to have plagiarized several elements (both motifs and samples) in the song "Do It" on the 2006 album Loose by Nelly Furtado without giving credit or compensation. See 2007 Timbaland plagiarism controversy.

Politics

Senator Joseph Biden

• Biden was forced to withdraw from the 1988 Democratic Presidential nominations when it was alleged that he had failed a 1965 introductory law school course on legal methodology due to plagiarism. "Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., fighting to salvage his Presidential campaign . . . acknowledged 'a mistake' in his youth, when he plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote in his first year at law school. Mr. Biden insisted, however, that he had done nothing 'malevolent,' that he had simply misunderstood the need to cite sources carefully." Biden withdrew from the race September 23, 1987, and reported the law school incident to the Delaware Supreme Court. The court's Board of Professional Responsibility cleared him of any allegations.
• Biden was also accused of plagiarizing portions of his speeches, and that he had copied several campaign speeches, notably those of British Labour leader Neil Kinnock and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He denied those charges. "And he asserted that another controversy, concerning recent reports of his using material from others' speeches without attribution, was 'much ado about nothing.'"

Iraq war

• In a New York Times editorial prior to the Iraq war, President Bush's National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice explained that Saddam Hussein could not be trusted for various reasons, including the fact that Hussein had committed plagiarism. "Iraq's declaration [to the United Nations regarding the state of its nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs] even resorted to unabashed plagiarism, with lengthy passages of United Nations reports copied word-for-word (or edited to remove any criticism of Iraq) and presented as original text."
• On February 3, 2003, Alastair Campbell, Prime Minister Tony Blair's Director of Communications and Strategy, released a briefing document to journalists entitled "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation." It described Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction programs. Journalists discovered that many sources, particularly an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi, had been copied word-for-word, including typographical errors. Journalists dubbed the document the "Dodgy Dossier." After the revelation, Blair's office issued a statement admitting that a mistake was made in not crediting its sources, but it did not concede that the quality of the documents's content was affected.

Vladimir Putin

• Russian President Vladimir Putin has been accused of plagiarism by fellows at the Brookings Institution who allege that "[l]arge chunks of Putin's economics dissertation on planning in the natural resources sector were lifted from a management text published by two University of Pittsburgh academics nearly 20 years earlier."

Wikipedia

• In November 2006, the Associated Press reported activist Daniel Brandt's claim to have uncovered 142 articles with plagiarized content among the 12,000 Wikipedia articles he chose to search. Wikipedia administrators responded that this list misidentifed some articles where Wikipedia had been plagiarized, and that they took action on the cases that involved copyright violations. He "called on Wikipedia to conduct a thorough review of all its articles."

Other instances

Martin Luther King

• In 1991 a Boston University investigation into allegatons of academic misconduct concluded that Martin Luther King, Jr. had indeed plagiarized large portions of his doctoral thesis. "A committee of scholars at Boston University concluded that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation, completed there in the 1950s." The BU committee recommended that King's doctoral degree should not be revoked; however, a letter is now attached to King's dissertation in the university library, noting that numerous passages were included without the appropriate citations of sources.
• It has been charged that for his "I Have A Dream" speech King plagiarized the 1952 address of Archibald Carey to the Republican National Convention, the similarities being in the reference to the Samuel Francis Smith patriotic hymn "America" in the peroration followed by a listing of geographical locations from which the orator exhorts his audience to "let freedom ring." Many, however, believe that the comparisons are so slightly similar that they do not rise to the level of plagiarism. King's "I Have a Dream" Speech, Carey's Speech, My Country, 'Tis of Thee.

William H. Swanson

• William H. Swanson, CEO, of Raytheon, admitted to plagiarism in claiming authorship for his booklet, "Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management," after being exposed by The New York Times. On May 2, 2006, Raytheon withdrew distribution of the book.

See also

• Academic dishonesty
• Contract cheating
• Credit (creative arts)
• Cryptomnesia
• Essay mill
• Fair use
• Kaavya Viswanathan
• Plagiarism detection
• Scientific misconduct

External links

• American Historical Association, "Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct" (2005)
• What is the price of plagiarism? A The Christian Science Monitor article
• Plagiarism at the College Level (article)
• The Assessment in Higher Education web site's plagiarism page contains links to a variety of resources (articles, books, cheat sites, etc) on plagiarism.
• "Plagiary: Cross-disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification." journal
• Plagiarism and Academia: Personal Experience, Bruce Schneier
• A Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy of Plagiarism, Grade Inflation and Standard English, Reg Johanson
• JISC Plagiarism Advisory Service Provides advice and guidance to UK learning institutions.