Abstract
Individuals discovered to have engaged in wide-scale serial plagiarism in philosophy are relatively few, but the academic publishers falling victim to them are many. Some of the most respected publishing houses in philosophy have recently faced the issue of having published plagiarized material. The chapter uses a specific context of serial plagiarism involving 43 articles and book chapters by one author of record as a test case. The various responses by these publishers to this instance of serial plagiarism provide a real-time snapshot of the practices for correcting the scholarly record in the discipline of philosophy. I propose a new rubric for evaluating published corrections of the scholarly record for cases of demonstrated plagiarism. On this rubric, the highest-scoring corrections are those that: (1) unambiguously declare that a plagiarized work is plagiarized, (2) clearly credit the original source material misappropriated in the act of plagiarism, and (3) are easily accessible to the scholarly community without registration barriers or paywalls. This analysis yields a twofold conclusion: first, relatively little uniformity exists among publishers in philosophy for responding to plagiarism; and second, the discipline of philosophy often falls short of the accepted practices for correcting the scholarly record in contrast to the natural sciences. This chapter considers only public, documented cases of academic plagiarism in philosophy and makes no new allegations of plagiarism.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter considers only public, documented cases of academic plagiarism in philosophy and makes no new allegations of plagiarism. This chapter appeared previously as Dougherty 2017.
- 2.
Evidence of plagiarism for cases 1–40 has been published in Dougherty, Harsting, and Friedman 2009. For cases 41–43, see the respective statements by publishers and editors discussed below (Anonymous 2011a, 2011g; Faesen et al. 2011). I reference the 43 cases according to this established enumeration.
- 3.
- 4.
The proposed model for the natural sciences by Bilbrey et al. (2014: 15–16) uses a value system as follows:
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0—No reason for retraction can be discerned from the notice.
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1—The reason for retraction can be inferred but is not stated clearly through the naming or definition of a category.
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2—The reason for retraction is clearly stated, but explanation is not given as to how the rest of the article was affected by retraction.
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3—The reason for retraction is clearly stated and explanation is given for if and how the entirety of the article was affected by the fault.
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- 5.
The act of asking readers to participate in the correction of published work has an early precedent. Ann Blair has examined how in the early history of printing, errata sheets included in published volumes often had instructions asking readers to use them and correct by hand the faulty pages (see Blair 2007: 21–22).
- 6.
For another appeal to a public health model for dealing with research misconduct, see Nylenna and Simonsen 2006.
- 7.
Some academic editors in biomedical disciplines explicitly encourage readers to disclose evidence of suspected wrongdoing. In an article titled, “Plagiarism and other Scientific Misconducts,” editors K. Höffken and H. Gabbert, write “Please support us with our efforts. Do not hesitate to inform us about any irregularity, violation or infringement” (2009: 328).
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Dougherty, M.V. (2018). A Test Case for Published Corrections: The Discipline of Philosophy. In: Correcting the Scholarly Record for Research Integrity. Research Ethics Forum, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99435-2_4
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