On plagiarism (again)
I was wondering if people might weigh in on this question that’s puzzling me.
I was recently reading a PhD thesis awarded by a Greek university. Let’s say that the title was something like, ‘Teaching English as a Second Language in Manchester from 1917 to 1967‘. The bulk of the thesis focuses on historical aspects of TESOL, as it contains archival information on the schools where English was taught, the coursebooks in use, student grades and the like.
Literally in the middle on all this, there is a chapter that presents an overview of Approaches and Methods. The structure of this chapter mirrors that of Stern (1983) and Richards and Rodgers (2001), as there are headings ranging from the grammar-translation method to suggestopedia and TPR. With the exception of the final section, these headings correspond exactly to the ones in the books I have cited, and are presented in the same order. Under each heading there is a summary of the information from the sources, in which I identified a number of sentences that are direct translations from the original (1-2 per paragraph). The referencing system is rather generic, in that there is a footnote at the end of each paragraph or so, where the author lists the relevant sections in several books, including (sometimes) the two books above.
It may also be relevant that the main supervisor of this study would not have been able to make an informed appraisal of this situation because he is from a field other than TESOL, and I believe his command of English to be rudimentary.
I think it is uncontroversial to say that this is poor scholarship, but does it also count as plagiarism? If it does, would the moral imperative towards research integrity trump the pragmatic imperative of protecting my budding career?
I guess it’s a Q of which analogy has more explanatory power for you 🙂
I am not sure that myself or my research are the salient issues here, nor is my confidence at stake. I will submit that my confidence (whether misguided or not) survived the appraisal of a mutual acquaintance that I am ‘academically unremarkable’ and I ‘have not shown potential for further [i.e. MA] study’, so it most certainly can withstand unfavourable comparisons with intellectual mediocrity.
The faith I read in your post is much appreciated, although I am not certain I share your optimistic outlook. To use yet another analogy, which I think better describes the zero-sum, winner-takes-all nature of this game, when one notices that other players have been pulling out cards from their sleeves in a game of poker, trust in one’s superior card-playing skills might provide poor counsel. A better course of action, I think, would be to either start a fight or to cut one’s loses and change tables. The former, it would seem, is inadvisable, and the latter involves a loss of confidence in the system.
Yes, analogies only take us so far 🙂 Just because I enjoy a drink now and then, do I get involved when those drinking near me in the bar are clearly getting drunkenly out of control? etc etc Each such analogy will have some explanatory power but also limitations ….
For sure, as our careers develop, we each have opportunities for inculcating, maintaining, and keeping vigilant for transgressions against, the highest academic standards vis-a-vis plagiarism, in our own work, our collaborative work, our supervisions of others, our reading of others’ texts, our reviewing activities etc etc. i.e. we have plenty of scope for being police!
Re the competition, my guess is that ‘quality will out’ (as my other used to say). If we have to beat our own drum (about our quality) by, e.g. puncturing a hole in the drum-skin of the competition, maybe our confidence in the quality of our own drum and drumming is an/the issue?
Thank you Richard, that was very clear and helpful. I especially liked the driving analogy.
But to extend this analogy further, I have actually reported a motorist whom I reasonably believed to be intoxicated, and whose driving was obviously endangering fellow travellers. And though I am not in the habit of beating my wife or daughter, I would think that there is a moral imperative to bring child abusers to the attention of the authorities, even if we are not professionally involved in law enforcement. The difference, it would seem, is that these cases involve a clear danger to the safety and welfare of others, which is hard to discern in academic malpractice.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should perhaps admit that my motives are rather less idealistic than persented above. This person seems to be applying for the same jobs as I do, and is consistently ranked above me. As the selection committees are made up of people of impecable integrity and their decisions are always impartial, I have been attributing this to her having a PhD, hence my interest in her thesis. I am not sure there’s much I can do (nor, in light of what you have written, much that I should do), but I think that just writing about it had a cathartic effect for me.
Without seeing the text, nor having run it against plagiarism software, my response is somewhat general. Ethical scholarship involves acknowledgement of ALL our sources, i.e. an acknowledgement of ALL that informs our thinking. If the structure of this thesis chapter has indeed been informed by the books you mention, then my Q would be: Is this relationship between thesis chapter structure and informing book chapter structure made explicit? If not, there is a plagiaristic problem.
Is it a big one? On the scale of poor academic technique to flagrant plagiarism, maybe not so big, but, nonetheless, it is problematic. Interestingly, some people seem to think plagiarism applies only to quotations not revealed as such, and they do not attend to the unacknowledged borrowing of the structuring of our thinking and texts. This is unhelpful.
To your more personal Q, I would say the following: being able to identify plagiaristic aspects of published texts is mainly useful because it should heighten our sense of what we should avoid. Whether or not we should do anything about the case in question is another matter. An analogy – Just because we are driving within the speedlimit on the motorway, do we report all those who don’t? If we were traffic cops, the answer would be different (and this is why academic examiners for example have a duty to be on guard for plagarism), but as general motorists with no vested interest in / responsibility for policing others, the answer would be no I guess.
Sadly, some published scholarship does not go as far as it should in revealing its relationship with others’ works. Also, some scholarship is ‘approximate’ in how it uses the ideas of others (and, as my recent and continuing discussion of Schon and reflection reveal, I fear I am guilty of this on occasion). So, we all need to be on our toes in both respects.