Plagiarism and the Distinctive Voice

The best defense against plagiarism is having a distinctive scholarly voice and point of view. By this mean that nobody else's prose, nobody else's ideas, should satisfy you. You will rarely spend whole pages summarizing other people's ideas, or presenting raw data. When you do, you will make it clear that that material comes from other sources, because you want to make it clear that that it is not yours. You will never confuse a sentence someone else wrote with one of your own.

Plagiarism arises out of a position of weakness. The student is trying to get up to a certain level of professional or trying to fill space in the paper. The senior scholar uses plagiarized verbiage as filler, without taking pride in every paragraph. Maybe he is overcommitted and has to churn things out fast and can't be bothered.

When I cite something I think is very brilliant, I make sure I am extra careful to give full credit. I feel self-confident enough to lavish praise on other scholars when appropriate, especially when their work helped mine along. When I quote anything, I am conscious of the style gap between quoted material and my own prose. I don't mean that I write better than anyone else, but that I have my own ethos of prose that will be distinctively different from that of other writers, good or bad. It also helps that I rarely agree with anybody else. (Just kidding.)

I think I have improved as a writer, but I look at some things I wrote 20 years ago and they still are more or less fine with me. I would change sentences, but I would do the same with sentences I wrote a year or month ago.

Plagiarism is somewhat more likely for more routine information, stuff that doesn't seem to belong to any particular person in the field. If I find a good statement that I think expresses a consensus view, I will quote that verbatim: it saves me some time, and I don't have to state my own views as though they were the consensus (they rarely are; I overestimate my agreement with other people many times.)

On the mechanical level, I make sure quotes go around a foreign phrase the second it goes into a word-processing document. It isn't even allowed to be there one second unattributed, without the protective cocoon of quotation marks. I never take notes paraphrasing something that I might confuse at a later date with my own notes from my own brain. I will paraphrase something in a word processing document with the source in front of me and provide the source in the act.

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.

Copier-coller

Here's a fascinating blog if you read French, about a set of plagiarism cases in a French university. "Copier-coller" I'm guessing means "copy and paste." There is a department in this university where dissertations are routinely copied word for word from other sources, with 100% or 80% of the content being plagiarized in the most most blatant way possible. This blog by a French professor is following the action. It's in his own department! Of course, they've threatened legal action against him, but the evidence is overwhelming in this type of plagiarism.

Corruption

There's a rather insignificant poet from a certain [language redacted]-speaking country. If you want to translate or write about this poet, however, you can earn a chunk of change, through a foundation that awards $1,500 prizes to promote this poet. I'm assuming that the competition is not going to be stiff, because nobody is writing about this poet except a few who are presumably doing so, at least in part, in the hopes of cashing in.

Although this is all above board and perfectly legal, it corrupts the process by introducing an incentive that is out of all proportion to normal "rewards" for translating or writing. I've tried to swallow my natural inclination and do some translations just for the cash, but I just couldn't. The poems were not easy to translate but they weren't very good either. [Of course, I could be wrong; he could be a brilliant poet. But why do you have to pay people to work on a brilliant poet?] It wasn't my virtue that made me incorruptible, but my disgust. If the poems had been just a little better I would have done it. It would seem more honest to pay a translator a decent salary and publish the guy's poems in a vanity press.

So corruption in this larger sense occurs when incentives are artificially skewed. It doesn't take a lot to skew things. I was almost tempted by a mere fifteen-hundred dollars.

***

Of course there is no "natural" system of incentives in the first place. Students write dissertations on topics they think are marketable. They see there are more jobs in one subfield than in another. I get more attention from a book on Lorca than from a treatise on prosody, what am I going to do? If you see that only administrators in your university get paid an upper-middle class income, you put your name in for an administrative gig.

Negative Criticism

I recently declined to do a tenure evaluation. The candidate involved had taken issue with me in his book, and I didn't want to do an evaluation that was mostly a debate surrounding particular issues of great importance to me. It didn't help that the person didn't cite my major article in which I take this position, using instead an older one. I also passed on an opportunity to write a book review of this same book. I could have pretty much demolished the book, but that would not have been very nice.

I recognized my own bias: I tend to think that scholars who agree with me are a little bit smarter than those who don't. Compensating for the bias, I would have had to write a glowing tenure letter saying how of course this scholar was correct in trying to refute me. I just didn't have it in me, though. I decided neither to help nor harm.

***

I also wrote a very scathing review of a book on Lorca in the last issue of Revista Hispánica Moderna. Here the ethical issue is improving the quality of the field by pointing out work that was not very good--in my opinion. The author of the book already has tenure, so I wasn't squashing anyone's career. I also had no bias, no stake in this particular debate.

I've done other scathing book reviews in the past. I've also been on the receiving end of a few negative reviews, and survived none the worse for wear. If I take a controversial position, I have to be expecting people to disagree with me.

A Brutal Profession

I've known some very nasty people in this profession. I'm very fortunate not to have anyone like that in my current department, but I've seen very bad situations in the past. Places where I dreaded going into the office.

Academic politics can be quite brutal; the competition to get a job at all can be quite fierce as well.

A good rule of thumb is that no conflict among colleagues should ever effect the graduate students. A graduate student should not have to worry about putting two colleagues together on the same committee or having to take sides in a faculty conflict.

Reviewing articles

What do I do if I think I know who wrote an article but am not sure? Usually, I feel confident about going about and doing it anyway, as long as I'm not sure. Sometimes my guesses have been wrong.

Gatekeeping

I just now rejected three articles for three separate prestigious journals (these seem to come in batches). I have a dissertation to read and a Graduate Student Doctoral Exam paper. This summer I have at least one tenure review to do. In short, I am a gate-keeper, one who is paid (well, usually not even paid) to say whether someone should pass an exam, get an article or book published, get tenure.

There are two ethical issues involved. One is to perform these duties fairly and conscientiously, to disqualify oneself when there is a conflict of interest or a breach of confidentiality, to put aside one's own stake in a particular debate in the interest of disinterest. This involves a narrow adherence to the ethical code of the profession.

The second issue is whether the process of gatekeeping itself furthers a larger aim. I want to promote the kind of work I think is truly valuable and help other people have successful careers like I have. There is no issue when the work is strong; even strong work that goes against my particular point of view is valuable in the larger scheme of things. Having to reject work, however, does me no good psychically. In most cases, the rejection is justified both on narrow grounds (the academic code) and in terms of my larger aim of not wanting to be embarrassed for my field. I like being a gate-keeper, but I like having a positive benefit. I can point to an issue of a journal and say, "I helped this author improve his or her article and get it publlshed." That's wonderful. But I wouldn't point to the same journal and proudly proclaim: "You see this issue, I kept three bad articles out of it."

Yet the bad articles do have to be kept out.

Excellence in Editorial Work

I serve on the editorial board of Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. The Australian Research Council has recently rated this journal as an A+. Here is their definition of an A+ journal

[a]n A+ journal would typically be one of the best in its field or subfield in which to publish and would typically cover the entire field/subfield. Virtually all papers they publish will be of a very high quality. These are journals where most of the work is important (it will really shape the field) and where researchers boast about getting accepted. Acceptance rates would typically be low and the editorial board would be dominated by field leaders, including many from top institutions.

It gets even better. My wife, Akiko Tsuchiya , and one of her colleagues at Washington University edit this journal. I've published in it several times, under two previous editors and regularly review articles for them. It is very satisfying to give a critique of an article that leads to its improvement and eventual publication.

I can't publish in this journal myself any more, because my spouse edits it. Neither of us would be comfortable with me trying to submit my work there. I'm happy to work on the editorial board. While it would be nice to publish there, since it's the best journal in my field, my career has done fine.