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Advance Online Version Volume
1, 2006
Papers
and Perspectives
(Adobe reader required for full
text of articles--download here)
Cases of Plagiarism Handled by the United States Office of Research
Integrity 1992-2005
Alan Price
Plagiary 2006 1 (1): 1-11 (20 January 2021)
Abstract
Since 1992, the Federal Office of Research Integrity has been
making public findings of plagiarism as scientific misconduct
against individuals involved in United States Public Health
Service supported research. This paper is a historical review
of the 19 ORI plagiarism cases, describing the characteristics
of those respondents, the PHS administrative actions taken against
them, the source of the plagiarized material, and the type of
person who detected the plagiarism. Almost all of the 10 plagiarists
debarred by ORI/PHS from Federal funding also falsified and/or
fabricated research material, thereby compounding the seriousness
of their plagiarism.
The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the Story
Jonathan Band
Plagiary 2006 1 (2): 1-17 (8 February 2021)
Abstract
Google’s announcement that it will include in its search
database the full text of books from five of the world’s
leading research libraries has provoked newspaper editorials,
public debates, and two lawsuits. Some of this attention can
be attributed to public fascination with any move taken by Google,
one of the most successful companies in the digital economy.
The sheer scale of the project and its possible benefits for
research have also captured the public imagination. Finally,
the controversy over copyright issues has been fueled by Google’s
willingness to pursue this ambitious effort notwithstanding
the opposition of the publishing industry and organizations
representing authors. Much of the press coverage, however, confuses
the facts, and the opposing sides often talk past each other
without engaging directly. This article will attempt to set
forth the facts and review the arguments in a systematic manner.
Although both sides have strong legal arguments, the article
concludes that the applicable legal precedents support Google’s
fair use position.
Copy This! A Historical Perspective On the Use of the
Photocopier in Art
John A. Walker
Plagiary 2006 1 (3): 1-3 (21 February 2021)
Abstract
Before digital technology had transformed the capabilities
for manipulating images and making them available for viewing
and download via the Internet, artists were making use of
innovative techniques in a genre which has come to be known
as “copy art”, also called “electrographic
art”, “photocopy art”, “electroworks”,
and “xerography”. Montage, distortion, and transformation
were effected through reducing, enlarging, and adjusting the
hue and tone, “xerographic” effects which are
achieved today through digital enhancements, alterations,
and transformations. The referencing of “image glut”,
“visual pollution”, and “image overload”
in this reprinted article from the late 1980s by John A. Walker
would seem to have much relevance for today when copying technology
has moved from the mechanical to the digital, enabling increasingly
sophisticated image manipulation techniques with their potential
for trompe l’oeil—within and without
the world of art.
On Campus: Author Discusses the "Cheating Culture"
With College Students
David Callahan
Plagiary 2006 1 (4): 1-8 (8 March
2006)
In a recent discussion with college students, David Callahan
probed the “dark side of American life”, the
cheating culture which has taken root in business, sports,
academe and other areas of American society. He explains
the three great forces driving the cheating culture, and
he questions whether people really want to live in a society
characterized by a panoply of cheating behaviors. His message
to students is that change is on the way. He is optimistic
about the potential for a more fair, more honest society
based on equal opportunity and rewards for those who work
hard, dream big, and push forward. His concrete suggestions
for leveling the playing field and resisting the cheating
culture are a challenge to college students to “Be
the change you want to see in the world”.
Plagiarism Is Easy, but Also Easy To Detect
Caroline Lyon, Ruth Barrett and James Malcolm
Plagiary 2006 1 (5): 1- 10 (27
March 2006)
The advent of electronic communication has
brought with it increasing problems of plagiarism, but at
the same time recent technological advances provide us with
tools to address these problems. This paper will first take
an overview of plagiarism as a problem, particularly in
the field of Higher Education. It will give an outline of
pedagogic issues, and approaches to reducing the problem.
A significant deterrent is the practice of running students’
work through plagiarism detectors, and ensuring that students
realise how effectively this can be done. New research indicates
that electronic copy detection can also be applied to Chinese
text, as is currently done for English and for programming
code. We describe one such detector, the Ferret, outlining
its application to English text and its potential for use
in other domains including Chinese language. We show how
the Ferret is based on exploiting underlying characteristics
of English word distribution, and that Chinese characters
have a similar distribution. The paper concludes by comparing
and contrasting man and machine when it comes to identifying
copied material, and indicating how their differing memory
processes can be harnessed to detect plagiarism.
Bureaucratic Plagiarism
Gavin Moodie
Plagiary 2006 1 (6): 1-5 (7 April
2006)
This paper identifies four types of failure to ascribe
authorship accurately in college administrations: institutional
anonymity, and three types of nominal authorship -
ghost-written, rubber stamp and nominal direction. It
argues that these failures to ascribe authorship accurately
are a problem for the good operation of college bureaucracies
as well as being a problem of principle and internal consistency.
The paper concludes by proposing non-disruptive ways of
acknowledging authorship in colleges’ administrations.
A Case of "Gray Plagiarism" From the
History of the History of Computing
Michael Davis
Plagiary 2006 1 (7): 1- 19 (15
May 2006)
Claiming as one's own what one knows to be the discovery
of another is certainly plagiarism. But what about merely
failing to acknowledge the work of another where one does
not give the impression that the discovery is one's own?
Does it matter how easy it was to make the discovery?
This paper analyzes a case in this gray area in academic
ethics. The focus is not on the failure itself to attribute
but on the attempt of an independent scholar who, believing
himself to be the victim of "gray plagiarism”,
sought a forum in which to make his complaint. The story
could be told from several perspectives. I shall tell
it primarily from the perspective of the complainant,
an outsider to academe, because I believe that way of
telling it best reveals the need to think more deeply
about how we (acting for the universities to which we
belong) assign credit, especially to scholars outside,
and about how we respond when someone complains of a failure
to assign credit. My purpose is not to indict individuals
but to change a system. This paper updates a case I first
described in 1993.
Love and Madness: A Forgery Too True
Ellen Lévy
Plagiary 2006 1 (8): 1-12 (26 June
2006)
This article moves from an account of the crime of the
Reverend James Hackman, who in 1779 murdered Martha Ray,
the mistress of Lord Sandwich, and was subsequently executed
for his deed, to the publishing history of the volumes
to which his crime gave rise. It then looks in more specific
detail at one of these volumes, Love and Madness:
A Story Too True (1780), which purported to be the
authentic correspondence of the murderer and his victim
but which was actually an epistolary novel written by
an exact contemporary of the young assassin. Love
and Madness was from the start a "bestseller"
but, also from the start, its ambiguous nature was recognized:
the literary reviews of the day almost immediately evoked
doubts concerning the book's authenticity. Soon, Herbert
Croft admitted responsibility for the biographical material
on the literary forger Thomas Chatterton that made up
one of the letters in the volume. He was, in fact, the
author of the entire correspondence, as internal evidence
is quick to reveal [. . . ]
Did the U.S. Army Distribute Smallpox
Blankets to Indians? Fabrication and Falsification in Ward
Churchill's Genocide Rhetoric
Thomas Brown
Plagiary 2006 1 (9): 1-30 (7 July
2006)
In this analysis of the genocide rhetoric employed over
the years by Ward Churchill, an ethnic studies professor
at the University of Colorado, a "distressing"
conclusion is reached: Churchill has habitually committed
multiple counts of research misconduct--specifically,
fabrication and falsification. While acknowledging the
"politicization" of the topic and evidence of
other outrages committed against Native American tribes
in times past, this study examines the different versions
of the "smallpox blankets" episode published
by Churchill between 1994 and 2003. The "preponderance
of evidence" standard of proof strongly indicates
that Churchill fabricated events that never occurred--namely
the U.S. Army's alleged distribution of smallpox infested
blankets to the Mandan Indians in 1837. The analysis additionally
reveals that Churchill falsified sources to support his
fabricated version of events, and also concealed evidence
in his cited sources that actually disconfirms, rather
than substantiates, his allegations of genocide.
How College Students Cheat On
In-Class Examinations: Creativity, Strain, and Techniques
of Innovation
Phillip C. H. Shon
Plagiary 2006 1 (10): 1-20 (23
August 2006)
There is adequate consensus among researchers that
cheating is widely practiced by students and poses a
serious problem across college campuses. Previous studies
of academic dishonesty have systematically identified
the psychological and social variables correlated to
cheating, but how students actually cheat has often
been overlooked. Using in-depth narratives from 119
students enrolled in an introductory criminology class,
this paper examines the variety of creative tactics
that students use to cheat during in-class examinations.
Findings indicate that students manipulate variables
such as the psychological and behavioral profiles of
their professors, unwitting accomplices, technology,
peers, spatial environments, and their own bodies, to
negotiate the contingent intricacies and dialectics
of academic dishonesty.
Why Footnotes Matter: Checking
Arming America's Claims
Clayton E. Cramer
Plagiary 2006 1 (11): 1-31
(29 September 2020)
Michael A. Bellesiles’s Arming America:
The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 2000) enjoyed nearly universal
critical acclaim and received a Bancroft Prize in
History in 2001. Criticism of its accuracy (initially
almost entirely from outside the academic historian
community) eventually led to an unprecedented revocation
of the Bancroft Prize, and Bellesiles’s resignation
from a tenured position at Emory University, largely
based on problems with Arming America’s
use of probate inventories. Arming America’s
problems were not confined to irreproducible probate
inventory statistics, but appeared throughout the
book. This paper gives examples of primary sources
falsified to support Bellesiles’s thesis, and
sources cited to prove a claim when all the
cited sources either directly contradict the claim,
or are irrelevant to the claim. The sheer volume of
these errors—and their consistent direction—would
seem to preclude honest error.
“Awesome job!”—Or
was it? The “many eyes” of
Asynchronous Writing Environments and the Implications
on Plagiarism
Scott Warnock
Plagiary 2006 1 (12): 1-14 (26
October 2006)
While digital technologies may contribute to the apparent
rise in plagiarism among students, these technologies
can help teachers develop constructive, rather than
punitive, course environments that discourage plagiarism.
In an online writing course taught by the author, a
student who plagiarized on the message boards was caught
and identified on those boards by two other students.
The author argues that various aspects of the boards
created a community dynamic that enabled the two students
to identify the plagiarism and to react to it. The students’
identification of the plagiarist stemmed partially from
indignation, but they also, because of the extensive
writing on the boards, discerned differences between
the plagiarized material and the plagiarist’s
other contributions during the term. The author draws
from several constructive plagiarism approaches, especially
Williams’ CORD method, to frame five ways message
boards facilitate a constructive approach to plagiarism:
allowing many readers, including students, to see the
writing; providing multiple opportunities for assessment;
creating bolder participants; allowing students to read
beyond content; and providing a means for students to
enact justice when outraged at their peers’ cheating.
Asynchronous writing environments can curb plagiarism
while complementing a positive writing and learning
environment.
Everybody’s Got Something
to Hide Except for Me and My Lawsuit: DJ Danger Mouse,
William S. Burroughs, and the Politics of “Grey
Tuesday”
Davis Schneiderman
Plagiary 2006 1 (13): 1-18 (6
November 2006)
On February 24, 2004, approximately 170 Web sites hosted
a controversial download of DJ Danger Mouse’s
The Grey Album, a “mash” record
composed of The Beatles’s The White Album
and Jay-Z’s The Black Album. Many of
the participating Web sites received “cease and
desist” letters from EMI (The Beatles’s
record company), yet the so-called “Grey Tuesday”
protest resulted in over 100,000 downloads of the record.
While mash tunes are a relatively recent phenomenon,
the issues of ownership and aesthetic production raised
by “Grey Tuesday” are as old as the notion
of the literary “author” as an autonomous
entity, and are complicated by deliberate literary plagiarisms
and copyright infringements. This paper examines the
idea of deliberate pastiche as it appears in William
S. Burroughs’s work, particularly in the collaborative
manifesto The Third Mind (1964/5)—a work
that merges discussion of plagiarist production with
plagiarist manifestations. Burroughs’s infamous
“cut-up” method, writes Gérard-Georges
Lemaire in the same text, “disconnects the concept
of reality that has been imposed upon us and then …
eventually escapes from the control of its manipulator”
(17). Burroughs theorized copyright infringement as
more than mere entertainment or artistic one-upsmanship;
he considered cut-ups as creative production that would
force the dominant system to address fundamental issues
of inequity by breaking the intention of the
work from its popular effect. It is no surprise that
Burroughs’s similarly produced audio experiments
have been cited as precedents to the current cut-and-mix
sound culture. The are many cogent connections between
Burroughs’s work and the DJ Danger Mouse-inspired
“Grey Tuesday”: 1) In the deliberate infringement
of previously copyrighted works, each artist actualizes
an assault on ownership standards, 2) these works accordingly
assume new political meanings beyond the control of
their “originators,” and 3) this elision
of the “authorial” persona is replaced by
a collaborative ethic that makes the audience
complicit in the success of the “illegal”
endeavor.
The full text of all papers and perspectives
articles will be made available through the University of Michigan's
Scholarly Publishing Office in structured electronic text format.
Links to advance online versions of these articles appear after
the abstracts above. Hardcopy annual version will be published
at the end of each calendar year. The views, opinions, and research
results in these "Papers and Perspectives" articles
are those of the respective authors who assume
full responsibility for their article content per the Plagiary
submissions guidelines. Responses
and critiques relating to these "Papers and Perspectives"
may be sent to the Editor. Authors will be given an opportunity
to reply prior to publication of any responses/critiques.
Paper proposals and manuscripts accepted for publications
consideration on an ongoing basis.
Plagiary represents a wide range of research
topics which address general and specific issues relating to plagiarism,
fabrication, and falsification. Devoted specifically to the scholarly,
cross-disciplinary study of plagiary and related behaviors across
genres of communication, Plagiary features research articles
and reports on discipline-specific misconduct, case studies (historical
and modern; inter-/intra-lingual), legal issues, literary traditions
and conceptualizations, popular genres of discourse, detection
and prevention, pedagogy (cheating & academic integrity),
technical reports on related phenomena, and other topics of clear
relevance (parody, pastiche, mimicry) along with book reviews
and responses to published articles.
See the "Information for Authors"
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