Maxine

I like the ones that are soooooooo dark to the depths of the soul, Margot ;-) And this one is pretty black. - Maxine

The dark stuff is really captiviating, isn't it? Not being a psychologist, I'm not sure why, but people just really are intrigued by the dark side of human nature... - Margot Kinberg

Yes, I empathise with this type of darkness, whereas I'm allergic to the slashfest type of "dark"! - Maxine

Good to see that reproducing other people's experiments isn't considered plagiarism by Nature any more: http://bjoern.brembs.net/news... ;-P - Björn Brembs

"Not even wrong". - Maxine

I still think that in science, it's the data that needs to not be plagiarized, but I could care less if someone copied someone else's _prose description_ of an independently acquired set of facts. Plagiarism to a humanities major is far different from plagiarism to a scientist. - Mr. Gunn

Mr. Gunn -- it seems unusual that you would not be concerned if a scientist were to publish a "_prose description_ of an independently acquired set of facts" if, for example, you were the scientist from whom the prose description was lifted and the plagiarizing writer became the one credited with the idea/s -- particularly given the popularity of "sound bites" as a communication tool. - Mickey Schafer

And I agree wholeheartedly that plagiarism is a different animal for humanities scholar and scientist -- but the difference is in the disciplines' relationship to language itself. In the case of science, where quoting is discouraged and language is simply a tool of communication, every sentence in a research paper represents an idea with an intellectual history behind it. If a sentence... more... - Mickey Schafer

What's odd is I cannot locate the PHS statement anywhere. ORI is here: http://ori.hhs.gov/policie... (see section on finding research misconduct) and the Federal Registry is here: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin.... I must be missing something in the searches. - Mickey Schafer

@Margot -- I think that the inconsistency related to defining plagiarism is that it has become the word used to name all kinds of writing misconduct -- plagiarism is really a major branch off of writing misconduct, but it is not the only branch -- what we need is a good, old-fashioned organizational chart! - Mickey Schafer

Mickey - I think you have a very well-taken point. The word isn't used precisely; in fact, I'd argue that it's become a sort of "blanket" word and is now used in free variation with the larger category of writing misconduct that you mentioned. It's an object lesson in using language precisely... - Margot Kinberg

Mickey - you're mostly right about what I meant. I really would not care if someone else lifted a bit of descriptive text from one of my papers. In fact, I encourage it. Scientists would do well to find a particularly clear way of explaining something and then use and re-use that wording, especially those who are publishing in a language they might not have totally mastered. In science,... more... - Mr. Gunn

Mr Gunn -- "quite common and accepted to re-use verbiage" is exactly why I've never used one of the plagiarism detection services. I'm going to run an experiment of sorts next semester and use Turnitin just to see what kind of percentages come up and how those tally against my "expert intuition" as to whether something was really plagiarized. And I wonder if we haven't engaged in a bit... more... - Mickey Schafer

"It's the ideas and the data which convey the intellectual history. - Mr. Gunn" -- this is quite interesting. I've worked with many students who stated their work was in their data. This remains the case while conversing with like-educated experts, but often fails when reaching across disciplines, where the frames of understanding that lead to a particular data set are not shared. I... more... - Mickey Schafer

Mickey - Let's just say that whether or not I get a grant depends much more strongly on the data and less strongly on the text of the application (really atrocious writing is a different matter). In that respect, the value of my academic output is in the data, and that's where the attribution becomes important. - Mr. Gunn