This is such an important topic! I agree, too, that some of the problem with plagiarism is that there's little consistency with what "counts" as plagiarism. - Margot Kinberg

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 has no citation, it is common knowledge, an unambiguous continuation of a previously cited idea, or original to the writer. In subsequent research, then, the "new" writer will follow the attribution trail left by previous writers. In the world you advocate of article-level metrics, then getting cited correctly and appropriately becomes very important. In an open access world, the trail left of who accessed what will be an important tool in detecting intellectual theft. - 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, as opposed to the humanities, the creative act, that which is supposed to be cited, is in the conception of the experiment and the conduct of thereof, not in the published words. It's more about who was the first to have an idea, not who was the first to use a particular phrasing. It really is quite common and accepted to re-use verbiage, at least in my field. It's the ideas and the data which convey the intellectual history. - 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 of semantic dancing here...in my head (and thus to my students), I separate attribution (the ethical requirement to give proper credit to other's creative material) from citation (the act or behavior of actually providing attribution). It may seem a silly distinction, but because there is so much mis-understanding amongst students, I've weighted some words to help them better understand the social expectation (attribution) from the social behavior (citing) -- same as the difference between "greeting" and "shaking hands"/"kissing"/"bowing". - 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 wonder about the "ideas" part, especially -- do you see your ideas represented in methods, formulas, techniques (you specialize in assays, right?)? Things where words are not so important? (truly not a snarky question! helps me understand where some of my students are coming from...or headed to!). - 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

Okay. That makes sense. And is representative of the relationship most scientists have to their output (data first; words a distant second). Thank you for responding. - Mickey Schafer