In [X’s new book] the following passage is encountered: ‘As Eward Said explained: “There are no innocent, no unideological myths, just as there are not “natural” myths. Every myth is a manufactured object, and it is the inherent bad faith of a myth to seem, or rather to pretend, to be a fact.’

Reading this passage, I wondered if the author was referring to the well-known author Edward Said, or if there was possibly a lesser-known writer named Eward Said. So I googled the name ‘Eward Said’, and the first hit that comes up is for an article by Becky Michele Mulvaney of Florida Atlantic University ( http://feminism.eserver.org/gender/cyberspace/gender-differences.txt ) which contains the following quotation:
 

Reference 9 is to Edward Said, ‘Orientalism and The October War: The Shattered Myths’, in Arabs in America, Myths and Realities, eds. Baha abu-Laban and Faith T. Zeadey (Medina University Press, 1986), p. 83)

It seems that [X] has reproduced this verbatim, without proper acknowledgement. Not only is the misprint of ‘Eward’ rather than ‘Edward’ Said present, but the verb ‘explained’ is used rather than ‘said’ or ‘put it’. It suggests to me that the quote has been cut-and-pasted without proper reference.


This comment was passed to my by a concerned book reviewer for the Australian Library Journal, who had reviewed a then new title by an Australian academic. I then contacted said academic, who passed this concern off with something along the lines of ‘Ah, a mere slip of the finger – one of the dangers of writing in an electronic age’. Now, there is an advert for a New Zealand beer which ends with the tag line, ‘Yeah, right’ - my feeling precisely, when this comment was received.

This reflects a long-standing, but increasingly problematic, occurrence in writing and publishing. It has long been a criticism of journalists, for example, that they happily copy without attribution, and one has come to expect this of The Fourth Estate. Clarke (2006) specifically highlights journalism as a profession noted for its weak stand on plagiarism generally, and failure to specify exactly what constitutes plagiarism. Other professions involving the creation of written works often have a similarly vague view of plagiarism.

Also, of course, plagiarism has been common among generations of students in secondary and tertiary education, and the corpus of literature on this issue is replete with papers and books addressing this issue. Back in 2000, for example, Lathrop and Foss published their important work, Student Cheating and Plagiarism in the Internet Era, which was one of the early, thorough works to address this issue in the context of e-documents. Much more recently, Tim Roberts (2008) has edited a collection entitled Student Plagiarism in an Online World: Problems and Solutions – many of the same issues are raised eight years on, but some of the solutions seem to be evolving. And the number of journal articles on student plagiarism beggars belief.

In Lathrop and Foss’s work the situation regarding student plagiarism has been aptly characterised in these words:
 

Unfortunately, the situation has not improved since 2000. One regularly hears reports of rampant cheating (aka plagiarism) by law students, reports that up to 80% of university students claim to have cheated and/or plagiarised, comments by students to the effect that, ‘What’s the problem? Everyone does it’. This suggests a moral and ethical volume that is beyond our ability to address in an editorial. But there are other issues to be dealt with at a more mundane level: it is technologically easy as more information becomes available online, so now many academics use Turnitin (http://turnitin.com/static/home.html) to catch plagiarism as a matter of course. Interestingly, Turnitin uses such euphemisms as ‘digital assessment’ and ‘learning management’ in place of the less ambiguous ‘plagiarism’. We might help matters if we call a spade a spade.

Ah, but wait – herein lies another problem. Many tertiary institutions almost never call a spade a spade for fear of litigation. Once this might have been limited to litigious Americans, but now ‘litigation-creep’ has spread throughout the anglophone world, with universities regularly adopting avoidance measures rather than tackling the issue head-on. In some institutions department heads are meant to report on potentially problematic student conduct so that legal authorities can be forewarned; there is a common feeling that perhaps we need to look at plagiarism as a variable offence: sometimes it may be an accident, sometimes it may be minor, usually it requires only a warning – anything to avoid a student challenge. Sorry, but this reminds me of the hair-splitting that occurred in Jesuit education of blessed memory (and I am a product of such education). Plagiarism either exists, or it does not; if a charge is laid, the perpetrator has an opportunity to mount a defence, but should never, in my view, simply receive a warning and an admonition ‘to be careful in future’.

Well, the point is probably this – plagiarism among students is something we have learned to live with, for which we have solutions such as Turnitin, and for which there are protocols of variable effectiveness (but never involve the judge). On the other hand, plagiarism among academics has probably been with us for as long as there have been universities, but on the whole we find it uncomfortable to deal with, and put it in the ‘too-hard’ basket. As Clarke (2006) suggests,

…The strong emphasis on plagiarism in the Google era presents a moral dilemma for academics: standards are being imposed on students, in some cases resulting in severe sanctions, in ways that may exceed, or at least perceived by students to exceed, those that are imposed on academics. The changed context demands re-assessment of plagiarism by academics and the clarification of attitudes and policies that have hitherto remained to a considerable extent implicit.

I may disagree to some extent with Clarke’s view that ‘standards are being imposed on students’ – or at least rigorous standards, but the intent of his argument is well-founded: what’s good for the gander is good for the goose. So, in the example cited at the beginning of this note, should I have reported the offence to academic X’s employer, to the publisher? Did he or she mount an effective defence by calling it a ‘slip of the finger’? Who am I to sit in judgement? Many questions arise, and my view now is that, yes, it should have been reported, because of the growing number of cases that academics, editors, writers, publishers face – it is almost as though a dam has burst since the iniquitous North American ‘publish or perish’ syndrome has affected the rest of the world. In times past, one would rarely have received a request from an author of an accepted paper for a letter confirming that this paper would be published. Now it has become almost a weekly occurrence: ‘I need this letter for my confirmation/promotion/tenure’.

This bursting of the dam, concurrent with the ease of accessing and downloading online articles, book chapters, research reports, etc., has led to an unfortunate confluence of institutional pressure and ease of copying. Serendipitously, as this note was being prepared, a reviewer for this journal returned two papers to me, stating that he had never come across anything like this – both papers contained instances of substantial plagiarism. A second reviewer claimed that he was ‘very upset’ to see such a blatant act of plagiarism. My comment to the authors was that: (1) they had committed gross acts of plagiarism unacceptable in an academic fraternity, (2) they must never submit work to this journal again, (3) their names were being circulated to other Emerald editors and to the publisher. In this case informing the employer was seen as an unacceptable option, since the culprits live in a society where ‘final solutions’ are applied for lesser offences.

Interestingly, Clarke (2006) warns that we must be aware of the subtleties of plagiarism in an academic environment, and his paper is commended for his rather convincing argumentation in this regard. In my view Clarke’s most telling arguments on ‘…why copying without attribution can also be valuable’ are two:

• practicality for readers
• alternative cultural interpretations.

Under the first rubric Clarke states that excessive paranoia about plagiarism, and the need to avoid it, leads to unreadability of the resulting text: (1) citations clutter text, (2) long reference lists take up space, (3) defensive wording makes for turgid style, and (4) editorial adjustments interfere with readability. ‘In short, many of the recommended techniques for avoiding the suspicion of misappropriation are dysfunctional from the viewpoint of most readers, especially those reading for pleasure, for answers, or as part of a course of study, rather than as a discipline’ Clarke 2006). While we accept Clarke’s views as a warning about being too zealous in ‘outing’ plagiarism, this is not to say that plagiarism under these circumstances is acceptable – it is clearly not, and we state this quite categorically.

In the second instance, alternative cultural interpretations, Clarke appears to echo something of Hofstede’s seminal work on cultural dimensions. In both Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values (1980), and Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind (1991), Hofstede convincingly argues that different cultures express values differently, and have different views of what constitutes honestly and ethical behaviour. Specifically, Clarke takes as an example East Asian culture, with its emphasis on submission to authority above any sense of individuality. ‘Perhaps cultures such as those are less concerned about what western European tradition calls “cheating” and “plagiarism”. Indeed so, as anyone in the West can affirm after dealing with well-meaning and hard-working Asian students who find the concept of plagiarism difficult to absorb.

There may be such exceptions, or such caveats as Clarke suggests, but it seems an opportune time for all of us involved in research and writing, editing and publishing to take a hard look at the issue of plagiarism, and to create clearly and fully articulated protocols regarding the nature, context and penalty for plagiarism.


References

Clarke, R. (2006) ‘Plagiarism by Academics: More Complex Than It Seems’. Journal of the Association for Information Systems 7, 2. Available
at:http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/SOS/Plag0602.html

Hofstede, G. (1980) Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Hofstede, G. (1991) Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Lathrop, A. and Foss, K. (2000) Student Cheating and Plagiarism in the Internet Era (Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited).

Roberts, T.S., ed. (2008) Student Plagiarism in an Online World: Problems and Solutions. (Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference/IGI
Global).