I am really frustrated...
I was looking arpund some theoretical issues and I came accross one paper from 2004 and a PhD from 2003 that had the exact same things in them!
One was a verbatim copy of the orther! I don't know who was the original writer...
I found it frustrating, as they are supposed to be academic texts and there isn't even any attempt to cover up plagiarism by changing the wording!!!!!
:-s:-s:-s

This may be a stupid question, but was there any link between the authors of the paper and the author of the thesis which may be a reason for this? Or was there somewhere in the thesis (possibly hidden away) where mitigation for this was given?

======= Date Modified 22 Jun 2011 11:08:10 =======

Plagiarism is rife. I taught MAs for two years and out of 16 students had two cases of plagiarism. The first was in a paper where I was second marker. The first marker had missed it completely, despite a clear change of tone. So I Googled the section that I suspected was plagiarism,and it was. The second was more serious, as it was the student whose dissertation I was supervising. She'd moved back to her home country, so I had to supervise by email. I'd already given her a plagiarism warning over the first bit of text she sent me. When she sent in her dissertation, every word was plagiarised from EIGHT different sources. I found the sources through Google, told the HOD, and we put it though Turnitin. She had to be failed, and I felt a bit sorry for her, but what can you do? I think that being able to spot plagiarism is a talent not many academics have. Moreover, I've just been proof-reading a PhD, and I'm certain he didn't write it. It has Made In India stamped all over it, if you like! So buying material is also endemic, even at PhD level (we've all seen young Gadaffi's PhD!).
I really do hate it. I checked out another piece on a charity website, knew it was plagiarised, checked it back to the original source, and saw that it had been stolen EIGHT times, and in one case a student had been awarded an MSc for it!

There's a massive scandal in Germany at the moment as various politicians are being found guilty of having plagiarised their PhDs and are having them taken away so it can be taken seriously if reported. If the PhD is earlier though then that's probably the original - could you google the author and let him/her know what you've found? Then if they want to report it to the journal, it's up to them.

======= Date Modified 22 Jun 2011 15:53:18 =======

No, I don't think so! Nothing wrong in paraphrasing, and you have to do it to some extent in a Lit Review. I adapted to graphics in my own LR. But I'm talking about word for word theft.:-s

[TYPO ALERT] 'to' should be 'two'!:$

Interesting, or maybe not. I'm shaking with anger. In the last two hours I've discovered that a book I ghost-wrote in 2002 was published in 2007, in the USA, by the woman I wrote it for. Because ghost-writing is speculative, you don't earn anything unless it sells. But that book (by its very nature and the huge reviews it attracted) must have sold for big bucks, and all my words are still all there. Earned nothing for six months of my life 24/7 when I was doing that.
Still in shock. I'm in email contact with my former agent who set this up so let's see what he can do. All the evidence is on my computer.
Plagiarism, to me, is a crime, whether it's academic, or commercial. It adds up to the same thing - theft.

======= Date Modified 22 Jun 2011 23:04:11 =======

I came across this recently in an academic book. Two very well respected academics had written exactly the same paragraph in their books - word for work. No reference at all. I assumed the first one must have actually written it and then the second one wrote it down somewhere, forgot to write the reference beside it and then assumed they had written it themselves. So shoddy!

Mackem, I really like you!

Hi Mackem

I hope I don't sound crass :$ I'm not a native English speaker, and I just wanted to check whether you mean 'appauling English' or 'appalling English.' Are both spellings accepted as proper spellings for the word? Thanks.

Thanks, and 'blatantly' I believe is the word:-)