iThenticate Blog

Featuring: Suma Ramachandran, Editor, Amba Research

The United States Office of Research Integrity (ORI), in an effort to maintain tighter controls on plagiarism in the scientific community, recently ruled that Gerald Lushington, the director of bioinformatics at Kansas University in Lawrence, was guilty of plagiarism and research misconduct for not reporting a case of plagiarized material he had spotted in a research paper. His associate director, Mahesh Visvanathan, the person who submitted the plagiarized work, was also censured for misconduct.

With access to written work at the fingertips of millions of people online, instances of plagiarism have dramatically risen in recent years. Many bloggers and social media voices are unaware of how (or why) to give proper attribution to the original author or source. Ideas on how to do so have been considered over the years -- e.g. inline source links -- for how to ensure that authors receive credit for their work, but none have been completely effective in citing the original source.

Part 3 - Scholarly Publishing - Adaptating to Change

Why do people plagiarize? A Huffington post article recently started off by answering this question. Ellen Siminoff writes: “It's that plate of cookies on the counter that you know you should keep away from because you're determined to stick to your diet ... but they're right there.”

Written by Eric Hoppe, Account Manager, Constant Content. Plagiarism has existed nearly as long as the written word itself, but it has never been easier for plagiarists to cut and paste some else’s words and claim them as their own. That can be a big problem for webmasters in search of quality website content and article writers for their websites, blogs and online stores. Webmasters know that they need to rank high in search engine results in order to compete. They also know that Google and other popular search engines take a dim view of duplicate content. Webmasters who buy articles they believe are original content can be in for an unpleasant, and dangerous, surprise when Google slaps them with a duplicate content penalty and buries their sites at the bottom of the rankings.

A quick Google search for ‘plagiarizing quotes’ or ‘plagiarism of quotes’ yields a plethora of results, however, most of the results are related to quotes about plagiarism.  There is nearly no information out there on plagiarizing quotations; instances where individuals have plagiarized other authors through the use of their quotations.

Writers often maintain that because they are the authors, they can reuse their work as they please; it couldn't be defined as "plagiarism" since they are not taking any words or ideas from someone else. However, while the debate on whether self-plagiarism is possible continues, the ethics of self-plagiarism is significant, especially because self-plagiarism can infringe upon a publisher’s copyright.

The practice of commissioning an anonymous writer, or ghostwriter, to do one’s writing has been employed for a number of famous books and papers in the past, including official presidential biographies.  Examples of ghostwriting exist in almost every field – from politics to literature to scientific research.  Ghostwriting is an industry of its own; thousands of people make their living every year by writing anonymously.  Although ghostwriting has been historically accepted, it has been undergoing some criticism recently that it is considered a form of plagiarism.