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Reassessing Academic Plagiarism

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Abstract

I argue that wrong of plagiarism does not primarily stem from the plagiarist’s illicit misappropriation of academic credit from the person she plagiarized. Instead, plagiarism is wrongful to the degree to which it runs counter to the purpose of academic work. Given that this is to increase knowledge and further understanding plagiarism will be wrongful to the extent that it impedes the achievement of these ends. This account of the wrong of plagiarism has two surprising (and related) implications. First, it follows from this account of the wrong of plagiarism that replication plagiarism might not be an academic wrong at all. (Replication plagiarism consists of the direct quotation or paraphrase of another’s work without attribution. The replication plagiarist thus plagiarizes primary sources, purloining for her own benefit the ideas of their authors). Second, even if replication plagiarism is still held to be an academic wrong, it will be a lesser wrong than bypass plagiarism. (Bypass plagiarism occurs when one quotes from, or provides a paraphrase of, a primary source, but although one cites the primary source one did not identify the quotation or provide the initial paraphrase oneself. Instead, one took the quotation, or drew upon an existing paraphrase, from a secondary source—and one did so without citing the secondary source to credit it as the source of one’s information about the primary source). Holding that bypass plagiarism is worse than replication plagiarizes reverses the usual assessment of the relative wrong of these two types of plagiarism.

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Notes

  1. For an outline of the various types of plagiarism see the taxonomy developed by Dougherty (2020), 2-3.

  2. Replication plagiarism can thus be either literal plagiarism or disguised plagiarism, as these are defined by Dougherty (2020), 2.

  3. Compression plagiarism (where a plagiarizer distills “a lengthy scholarly text into a short one”; Dougherty (2020), 3) could thus be either replication plagiarism or bypass source plagiarism, depending on whether the plagiarized passage is an exegesis of another source or the expression of ideas original to it.

  4. See, for example, John Finnis’ comments on the allegation that the (then) Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch committed bypass plagiarism. Finnis is quoted by Whelan (2017).

  5. How academic institutions make decisions concerning hiring, tenure, and promotion in Alternative Academia is mysterious, but competitive committee avoidance is said to be involved.

  6. For an example of a recent work that was published anonymously, see Anonymous (2001).

  7. This does not imply that plagiarism is always wrong.

  8. In David Lodge’s novella Home Truths, Fanny Tarrant asked “‘Which writers are you thinking of?’” to which the response was given “‘The same ones that you’re thinking of’” (Lodge, 1999, 44).

  9. This response also indicates that there is a tension in standard thinking about plagiarism. While the credit-based account is widely accepted, the standard response to a revelation of plagiarism (i.e., that it is an offense against the academic community) is not that which would be supported by the credit-based account.

  10. More examples of replication plagiarism are outlined in Part V.

  11. This section is illustrative, rather than accusatory. These examples have all been previously documented. I discuss Kruse’s replication out of the available examples of this type of plagiarism as it has not yet been discussed in the academic literature.

  12. White Flight was based on Kruse’s 2000 PhD thesis. After Magness’ allegations were made public an ad hoc committee of Princeton’s faculty was convened to investigate the charges. They determined that Kruse was not guilty of research misconduct, as his plagiarism was “the result of careless cutting and pasting; there was no attempt made to conceal an intellectual debt”. (Extracted from a confidential report; this quoted section was shared by Kruse with permission of the committee. See Bailey, 2022).

  13. Magness’ claim that Kruse plagiarized this list from Bayor is strengthened by his (Magness’) observation that both this list and the sentences that preceded it in Bayor’s Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta appeared in Kruse’s Cornell dissertation. (Magness, 2022).

  14. Magness supports his claim that Kruse plagiarized this anecdote from Fowler by noting that other elements of Kruse’s One Nation Under God “showed similarities to Fowler's prose, with only minor changes; in total, the textual commonalities continue for more than a page” (Magness, 2022).

  15. Radin’s concern was with protecting an “ideal of personhood” that “includes the ideal of sexual interaction as equal nonmonetized sharing” (Radin, 1986, 1921) rather than one on which intimacy was a preferred attribute of sexual interaction. (“[E]qual nonmonetarized sharing” is distinct from intimacy; the former is compatible with casual sex in a way that the latter is not).

  16. Those parts of the original that Brennan and Jaworski misquoted are in bold; words and punctuation that they inserted are in brackets in bold. Note that this passage is excerpted from a much longer one; the first elision is of 13 lines, while the second is of 9.

  17. Almost but not exactly; they introduced a typographical error.

  18. By contrast, while Yew-Kwang Ng (2019, 30) also replicated Brennan and Jaworski’s misquotation of Hayek he cited them as his source of it. He thus avoided committing bypass quotation plagiarism.

  19. Dougherty identifies Schulz only as “N” in his article as at the time of its writing Schulz’s work was only suspected rather than confirmed plagiarism. Subsequent to the publication of Dougherty’s article was retracted owing to its translation plagiarism. See Weinberg (2019).

  20. The same is not true of a successful bypass plagiarist. This comparison between a forger and a plagiarist occurs frequently in discussions of plagiarism (see e.g., Ritter, 2007, 734).

  21. For a discussion of this in the context of comparing the wrong of an academic publishing a journal article that contains plagiarized sections and an Op Ed that contains plagiarism, see Hiller and Peters (2005).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, The College of New Jersey, 2000 Pennington Rd, Ewing, NJ, 08628, USA

    James Stacey Taylor

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Taylor, J.S. Reassessing Academic Plagiarism. J Acad Ethics (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-023-09478-4

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