A moment with CJ Holmes

In any academic community, the issue of plagiarism is a constantly present subject. In the first week of classes of my undergraduate career, and in the first week of classes of my graduate career, I was showered with information about plagiarism and warnings regarding the institution’s reaction against plagiarism’s appearance. Institutions, such as Emory University, even have associations I would label as plagiarism institutions. test

However, plagiarism is not simply relegated to the realm of immature students. It is a constant issue within the professional scientific community. As Dave Mcmullin observes in reference to the research fraud of Jan Hendrik Schön,

" [R]esearch suggests that scientific fraud is widespread. In a comprehensive study involving 4,000 researchers from 100 faculties, a University of Minnesota research team found that one in three scientists sometimes plagiarize, and that 22 percent of all researchers admit to sometimes handling data carelessly. . . . Fraud seems most likely to pop up in the research of unmonitored scientists who are working alone on irreproducible research."

Source: test

Famousplagiarists.com even has an entire website dedicated to documenting the noteworthy historical plagiarists. For example, Shervert Frazier was a Harvard Medical School professor who plagiarized paragraphs of published articles that were then discovered by a graduate student. He had to resign his position (although he did receive a position at the Harvard affiliated McLean Hospital and was able to continue with his career).

However, the nature of the Internet, its collaboration among individuals and proliferation of information, makes plagiarism much easier. It is easier to plagiarize, both intentionally and mistakenly, and it is easier to get caught. But the conceptual question is how has the nature of plagiarism changed? At what point does collaboration move beyond, into plagiarism? How extensively does one’s citing of sources have to go? Could an acknowledgement be sufficient?

When it comes to plagiarism of a professional and scientific nature, however, there is considerably less grey area. If an individual is publishing scientific research then they need to prove their findings every step of the way, and all content has to be either cited or original. Furthermore, extensive care needs to be taken to ensure that all results are not doctored or manipulated towards some sort of intended results.

A concluding thought question is how this nature of scientific research has changed, and will continue to do so, with the expansion of accessible information on the web.

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