Tracing

Tracing is a technique of plagiarism that consists of closely following the shape of another secondary source. (I am unsure of who coined the term but it came up in the recent Sokal / Fischer controversy.) You might use some of the same quotes for the same purposes, or summarize at too great a length, too closely. It is true that you are free to use a quote you found quoted already elsewhere, but there are some cautions here. You should indicate "qtd in" if you found the source in a third place and didn't go back to the original. You should be careful about reproducing 3rd party errors (misquoting a source the same way someone else did). You should not take over several 3rd-hand quotes in a row from another source, especially if these quotes are distinctive or uncommon, or seemingly unrelated to the topic.

For example, if I am writing about Juan Ramón Jiménez and quote Wittgenstein, Barthes, and Derrida in that order. I don't own those quotes: I am not Wittgenstein, Barthes, or Derrida. But it is distinctive to use those exact authors and quotes to explicate Jiménez's poetry. You have to say "qtd. in Mayhew" in that context.

I feel that a summary of other material should be either

(1) Much shorter. You are extracting the essence of that source, not repeating all of its findings one after another.

(2) Much longer. You are taking something short in the original text and exploring additional implications.

(3) Shorter and longer at the same time, like an accordion. You are sometimes compressing, sometimes expanding, on what the other source said.

If you write a paragraph summarizing another paragraph of about equal length, then you are probably doing something wrong: why not just quote the paragraph verbatim if you are neither compressing nor expanding?

Citation and Distinctive Language

Take a distinctive combination of words: "her labile yet exigent demeanor"; "as non-descript as a sparrow in the suburbs." When you are paraphrasing a secondary source, your own vocabulary will overlap somewhat with that source, but you wouldn't want to use a phrase like that from the source you are citing without quotation marks. An especially distinctive or felicitous phrase has more of a claim not to be repeated without attribution. By the same token, you would not say that, 'according to Fulano, HItler "invaded Poland" in 1939.' The quotation marks make no sense there, since neither the idea not the words have any claim to be distinctive. Putting those words into quotes would imply that you were commenting, in some way, on that particular combination of words.

Human language is creative in the rather ordinary sense that we can invent phrases and sentences that have (probably) never been used before. For example, I could find no examples on google where labile and exigent were even in the same vicinity in a sentence. Even a string of ordinary words can be distinctive: "As the cat stepped over the top of the jamcloset, first the right forefoot, carefully, then the hind, stepped down, into the pit of the empty flowerpot." Sure, there is a torrent of words on the internet, but if you express your own thoughts precisely, trying to say exactly what you mean, you are unlikely to duplicate the previous efforts of any other writer.

There are also facts that are banal and repeated from source to source with no change. Somebody was born in such and such a place in such and such a year. There is a standard wording for that, even.

I hate when people cite my banal statements. They have every right to do it, but I'd rather they cite me where I'm making a good point rather than for background.

Another Plagiarism Case

Here is another plagiarism case. (Hat tip to Margaret Soltan.) The perpetrator, Professor Fischer said, in his defense

When asked whether the verbatim material should have been in quotation marks, he responded: "Yes, but does one have to change every word? I don't think what I did is all that uncommon. I think the important part is to cite the works."

Does one have to change every word? That is such a revealing statement because it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding, so fundamental that the person who said it should be tarred and feathered. It's not plagiarism just because you didn't change enough of the words from the original passage to cover up your tracks. You cannot just take a passage and change enough words to make it your own work, because even a paraphrase has to be cited as such. You have to be clear about what is essentially a paraphrase of someone else's ideas, even if you change every damned word.You cannot just have a citation to the work somewhere, a few paragraphs or pages away. It is not enough to cite the works; you have to cite them in a way that doesn't obscure the nature and extent of your debt to them.

The defenses on the CHE site, by some of the commenters, are outrageous. They point out that most of the guy's writing is not plagiarized from other sources. Why, there are whole paragraphs that are not plagiarized, In fact, only 19 separate cases were found, leaving the vast majority of this scholar's work untouched.

But I'm assuming most plagiarists don't do it on every page. It would be like the bank robber saying that he goes into the bank plenty of times without robbing it. Here is one commenter:

Methodologically, all we have here is a few hundred words from which were are supposed to judge a book of how many words. What overall percentage is plagiarised (this percentage would inform our judgements of students ?) What percentage, too, of the important stuff the book says, rather than this nuts-and-bolts explication would end up higlighted ?

A plagiarism offense is an offense. It doesn't really matter what percent of the total work is non-original. A few hundred words for each plagiarized passage is enough.

I'd also like to point out that the plagiarisms were found by google searches. Obviously, not every piece of text is googleable, so there could actually be more cases. I wouldn't be surprised if google missed a few case, especially since it would only catch "copy and paste" examples, not paraphrases where enough words were changed.

More on Citation

Maybe you think I'm mean-spirited in pointing to inadequate citations in a (quasi)scholarly publication. Scholars, though, should expect readers to check their citations. The basic purpose of a citation is to provide support for a claim by providing documentation of sources that made this claim previously, or to document what other scholars have concluded, even if these conclusions are ones you want to question. You can also work backwards, checking the citations in cited sources to see if they are valid too. Tracing claims backwards through the references of several articles is an excellent way of learning the secondary literature in a subfield.

There might be several reasons why I might check sources. For example, the Edward Said citation I talked about in yesterday's post seemed suspicious because I know that is not the main point of Said's book. Sometimes I'll see two citations side by side that might seem incompatible or wildly different in genre: if someone is citing Shakespeare and Talcott Parsons to support the same claim I might get suspicious. Maybe a claim seems improbable and I want to see if the sources cited really support it. In other cases, I might just be curious about what a previous author said, so I'll check out the source for that reason. Maybe it contains a separate claim that I want to use in my own work.

Overcitation can cloud the waters by making it difficult for readers to check the references, sometimes creating a false impression that a lot of serious research has gone on. Massive references can intimidate less experienced scholars. A superfluous source is one that is adduced in support of a non-controversial or over-obvious point, or is redundant or irrelevant, or doesn't quite support the claim being made. Since overcitation is not a hanging offense like plagiarism, people get away with it a lot more.

Another mistake some people make is place all references on equal footing. What if the source I'm citing is a self-help book of dubious scholarly merit? It is still a name in parentheses with a page number and a date, but it should not have the same authority. Maybe it is a book published 100-years ago. Should I cite it alongside a more recent source without acknowledging the time lag? I want to feel I trust a scholar to have made the relevant acts of discrimination so sh/e can steer me to valid sources of information. Anything that undermines that trust weakens scholarly authority.

Citation Failure

Bob Basil's first post came yesterday. He offers a fresh perspective, complementary to my own but a bit different in tone.

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Citation failure occurs when authors cite a text to support a claim, but in an incomplete or confusing way. Take this example from Twale & De Luca, Faculty Incivility:

Knowledge and acceptance are prerequisites to claiming any power and authority over other members of the culture (Eagleton, 2000; Said, 1993). Without recognition of the power it takes to eradicate a bully culture, it will prevail. Culture is insular and molds its members so much that when they are steeped too heavily in it, the culture blinds them to all other things. Culture may be so engrained by the majority of members as to go unnoticed by them, but it will surely be reflected in the actions of new entrants and subversives who have not fully embraced the culture (Bourdieu, 1977). [p. 96]

Putting aside the infelicitous writing, the mixed metaphors and stylistic tone-deafness, I'd like to focus on the citation practice. The first thing I notice is that the first claim is very general, almost uncontroversial, yet also imprecise. Knowledge of what? Acceptance of what, or by whom? Secondly, both Eagleton and Said are credited with this insight. Looking to the bibliography, I see that these are not academic articles, but entire books. So Terry Eagleton, at some point in his 2000 book The Idea of Culture, lends support to this idea, as does Edward Said, at some point in his book Culture and Imperialism. There are no page numbers, so a reader would have to judge whether these claims are supported by looking holistically at these books. "Bourdieu 1977" is also an entire book. Here the claim is a little more specific, but how and where and to what end does Bourdieu make this claim, in his book Outline of a Theory of Practice? Do the authors of this study on academic bullying really understand Said and Bourdieu, or are they just name-dropping? How do the claims Twale and De Luca make on their own in this paragraph relate to the claims attributed to their cited references?

A fifteen page list of references seems to add scholarly gravitas to this work, but citation failure this pervasive undermines this impression--especially for a reader like myself who is somewhat familiar with the ideas of Said, Eagleton, and Bourdieu. To be fair, I should point out that not all the references in this book are this sloppy, only a few I've checked so far. I wouldn't want to be an academic bully!

So what is the correct path to successful citation? First, the claim itself must be specific and concrete, something distinctive. Secondly, the reader must have the tools to find specific support for the claim in the cited source. A page number perhaps. You can cite the entire article with no page numbers, if you are citing the central claim of that article. You could even get away with citing an entire book with no page numbers, if you were referring to the central argument of that book and made it clear what that argument is. A 200-page book will contain many sets of claims.

You can either cite directly, taking language from your source verbatim, or paraphrase. If there is direct discourse, a page number is obligatory. If you paraphrase a specific claim, you also need a page number or numbers, unless, by implication, the claim is that of an entire article.

I've seen this loose style of citation more in some less rigorous branches of the social sciences than in my own field, but I still think it is instructive to look at weak examples--as opposed to more subtle ones where citation failure is more a matter of nuance.

See also this post by Thomas that also addresses some issues related to the rigor of citations. I read his post before writing my own and owe some of my interest in this topic to him.

Critical Voice

Critical voice means sounding like yourself. It means writing in such a way that your own scholarly persona is at the forefront. We say a student lacks critical voice when he or she is using citations from other scholars to make his/her points, and lacks a strong perspective. Stylistically, having a voice means choosing stylistic options deliberately rather than using a default style (generic acadamese) or an imitation of someone else's style. A strong theoretical model can weaken one's own prose. For example, if one has been reading Foucault a lot then the inclusion of a lot of that jargon can make one's prose sound derivative.

Whatever the other defects of my scholarship, I think that it always sounds like me. If I had to define my own voice it would be a little bit impatient and irreverent, fond of brash and opinionated statements but at the same time careful in qualifying them; self-conscious about my own biases, but at the same time fully invested in them. My style is clear but complex in its ideas. I rarely offer a paragraph of mere information. I am relatively laconic, but can sometimes slip into verbosity. I like to slip in the occasional huge vocabulary word (chthonic) just for fun. I like precision and humor...

It might be interesting to define your own style in this way. Do a stylistic self-portrait. What did you find? If you couldn't do it, why not?

Ninguneo

Ninguneo means being ignored, more or less. Scholarship can be lonely, and when an article falls into the black hole of never being cited, it is kind of depressing. I was sick of my dissertation topic so I didn't keep up with the scholarship on it. Today, however I found a pretty nice citation of my work from the late 1990s that I had missed:

Conviene sin embargo recordar aquí el trabajo crítico más original y exento con relación a los debates relacionados con la poesía social, de Jonathan Mayhew, tanto "The Dialectic of the Sign in Claudio Rodríguez's Alianza y condena" [...] como "The Motive for Metaphor: The Rhetoric of Social Solidarity in Claudio Rodríguez's Conjuros." Un discurso satisfactoriamente enjundioso , en buena medida bajo la tutela intelectual de Frederic Jameson, que supera la pesada dialéctica falaz del compromiso y la consigna partidaria en nombre de una más profunda solidaridad ética.

García Berio, La forma interior: la creación poética de Claudio Rodríguez, p. 70.

And that's not the only citation to my work in this book. So maybe I shouldn't complain so much about the ninguneo. I have been, in fact, very fortunate that my work has been recognized in Spain and cited with some frequency, especially since my work has appeared about 95% in English. I've had other cases where someone bases their entire argument on my work but cites me only for a minor point--and that's in the US.

Enjundioso means substantial, vigorous. I was never inlfluenced by Jameson, that I know of, but I'll take the compliment anyway. I supersede the tiresome dialectic of social commitment in favor of a more profound ethical solidarity. My work is the most original on this topic.