I recently ran across the website for the journal Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification. (Actually, it was mentioned in George Reisch and Gary Hardcastle’s introduction to the book Bullshit and Philosophy, a collection of chapters expanding on Henry Frankfurt’s little philosophical classic, On Bullshit.)
It seems only fitting, given the vast amount of plagiarism and allied vices that we now find in science, history, literature, journalism, etc., that this fascinating topic receive proper academic treatment in its own right.
The journal, which began in 2006, describes its own mandate thus:
A refereed online journal, Plagiary represents a wide range of research topics which address general and specific issues relating to plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification. Devoted specifically to the scholarly, cross-disciplinary study of plagiary and related behaviors across genres of communication, Plagiary will feature research articles and reports on discipline-specific misconduct, case studies (historical and modern; inter-/intra-lingual), legal issues, literary traditions and conceptualizations, popular genres of discourse, detection and prevention, pedagogy (cheating/academic integrity), technical reports on related phenomena, and other topics of clear relevance (i.e. mimicry, parody, pastiche) along with book reviews and responses to published articles.
It is edited by John P. Lesko, a linguist at Saginaw Valley State University. Its editorial board features a wide array of disciplines, including one psychologist, Joshua D. Landau of York College of Pennsylvania. It is published by the
Some article titles include:
- “Curing the Cold but Killing the Patient? Turnitin.com, Online Paper Mills, and the Outsourcing of Academic Work“
- “Gender Differences in Student Ethics: Are Females Really More Ethical?“
- “Ward Churchill’s Twelve Excuses for Plagiarism“
- “The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the Story“
- “How College Students Cheat On In-Class Examinations: Creativity, Strain, and Techniques of Innovation“
I only wonder how long it will be before someone attempts to “punk” the journal by sending them a submission that has itself been plagiarized from somewhere else.
I’m not sure what any of this has to do with the history of psychology, specifically, but I thought it would be interesting to many of our readers nevertheless.
I am not sure either but I enjoyed the post. Particularly because it is very frequent, for non english speaking professionals (doctors, scientists, sociologists, you name it…) to “copy and paste” relatively big chunks of articles and re-process them in other articles with spanish authorship (substitute spanish with french, italian, etc).
I would like to comment on the necessity of also tracking the plagiarism of “scholars” I don’t want to mention their names, but I have fiound the more famous the author (s) the nore the plagiarism.
In my teaching career I found assigning research projects about something where there was no ready source of data, requiring original research by the students stopped all plagiarism. if you ask a student to find evidence of Marfan’s syndrome in canal laborers in l900, this is something not easy to find, or the capacity of a wooden gondola car on the Reading Railroad , Lackawanna Division ,in l899, this is not easy to discover or the location of Frederick WALTER (not Winslow) Taylor’s “Mouseridge ” estate in l893, this will be almost impossible. but this inform,ation is crucial if you wish to discover something NEW about Frederick Winslow Taylor.