{"id":1905,"date":"2011-04-15T22:23:42","date_gmt":"2011-04-15T21:23:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edtechandtesol.info\/phd\/?p=1905"},"modified":"2011-04-15T22:23:42","modified_gmt":"2011-04-15T21:23:42","slug":"on-review-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/?p=1905","title":{"rendered":"On review…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some of you know that I am in the editorial team of the Journal of English as an International Language<\/em>. Despite the fancy title of ‘Editor’ (a gross case of ‘title inflation’), all I really do is forward papers to people from a pool of reviewers, or occassionally review them myself if the topic is within my sphere of expertise. It’s pretty uneventful really, but something just happened which I found confusing, and I’d welcome your reactions.<\/p>\n

I was just reading a paper reporting on an empirical study. This paper had already gone through a round of review, some changes had been recommended, the author had acted on those changes and resubmitted. All I had to do was go over the document one last time, aided by a very helpful table prepared by the author -a senior scholar in an Arab country- where the reviewers’ suggestions were listed and cross-referenced against changes implemented.\u00a0The study described was actually quite interesting, the methods were sound, the discussion well-argued, and things were looking good for this submission. Except for one detail: the prose, which was elegant and clear in the introduction and literature review, deteriorated rapidly as one made one’s way down the manuscript. ‘He must have got tired’ I thought…<\/p>\n

Or maybe not? Just to make sure, I cautiously copy-pasted a particularly well-crafted phrase into Google… And indeed, there it was, embedded in the article the author had cited. In fact, the entire paragraph had been copied verbatim from the article. This is bad, I thought, but clearly he wasn’t trying to take credit for the idea, or else he wouldn’t have cited the article. We can save this, surely: ‘all I need to do is have him re-phrase this section’. But now I had to check further, and what I found confirmed my worst suspicion: two more paragraphs had been copied from a conference paper penned by a graduate student (no attribution here), and much of what remained in the literature review had been stitched together from ERIC abstracts, some attributed, some not.<\/p>\n

So, why am I surprised? After all, as a teacher this is not the first time I come across plagiarism. But what I trully cannot understand is why an academic could have thought that they might get away with something so blatantly obvious. I did google the author’s name, and it turned out that he has a PhD from a Russell Group university, so clearly he must be able to write a 2-page literature review with little or no effort. Why then would he do something as stupid as that? And why would a senior academic, of all people, stake their reputation when they have little to prove?<\/p>\n

I guess my primary reason for making this post wast to vent off my fustration that the reviewers and I have wasted so much time and effort on a paper that is unusable. But there are any insights on the questions above, I would very much like to read about them, because it really makes no sense…<\/p>\n

Oh, and the author? He’s been blacklisted, and I understand that the Chief Editor will be contacting his institution soon, although I doubt that they will take any action.<\/p>\n

Achilleas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some of you know that I am in the editorial team of the Journal of English as an International Language. Despite the fancy title of ‘Editor’ (a gross case of ‘title inflation’), all I really do is forward papers to people from a pool of reviewers, or occassionally review them myself if the topic is within my sphere of expertise. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p865eh-uJ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1905"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1905\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}