The problem of plagiarism's being discussed again in romance-land (because of something cross-posted at Dear Author and the Smart Bitches). I don't want to get into a discussion of the details of what constitutes plagiarism (anyone who's interested in our views on that can take a look at the posts Sarah and I wrote last year, and there's discussion of it on both the DA and SB threads). No, what I want is some help in deciding what to do when one discovers an instance of what one thinks might be plagiarism.In a romance I was working on (written in 1979, not by any author with an online presence and no-one at all famous, just in case anyone is worried) I noticed a couple of sentences which contain significant fragments of text that are identical, or near identical, to parts of sentences in the current edition of the online Encyclopedia Britannica, at least the parts of it I could read. The trouble is that access to the content of the EB is restricted, which is why matching phrases come up via Google but I couldn't guarantee I'd be able to provide entirely accurate transcriptions of the relevant sections of the EB passages in question. I haven't had time yet to find an edition of the EB which would have been available in the 1970s, but I've no reason to suspect that the EB copied details from a romance novel, nor could the similarities be accidental, so I'm working on the assumption that that part of the EB hasn't changed much in later editions. I'll double check all that before I take any action, which is why I'm not including the name of the author here, or quoting the passages in question. I don't want to fall into the ethical problem of wrongly accusing someone of plagiarism, after all.
No, my ethical problem is about what I should do if, as I expect it will, the text in the older, paper copy of the EB matches that of the modern, online EB. I'll give a bit of an overview of the problem, to give a bit of context and describe the possible extent/severity of it.
Some sentence fragments in the novel which matched those in the EB were describing technical aspects of a building that the heroine is visiting (and is the building described in the EB), but other, non-technical parts could certainly have been changed and put into the author's own words and she didn't do that. I noticed the problem a while ago, and I was troubled by it, but as Nora Roberts wrote on the thread at Dear Author, "I’d need more than one sentence to get my dander up." Then the question of plagiarism was raised again at Dear Author and the Smart Bitches. As a result of the discussions there, I went back to the novel to take a closer look and last night I came across another couple of sentences with the same problem, just a few pages after the ones I'd already found. That's when I really felt I couldn't let it slide.
Enough little changes had been made to make me suspect that the author deliberately reworked the sentences in order to avoid full sentences of word-for-word copying. I suppose it's conceivable that she copied the sentences verbatim from the EB (though she'd have had to just copied out those specific sentences and none of the rest of the article for that to be credible), left them for a while in a pile of papers without annotating the source, then came across them and thought she'd already changed them enough to make them hers, and at that point reworked them slightly. Possible, but not very likely.
Maybe she thought she'd changed them enough for it not to be plagiarism. As we all know, though, using someone else's words while sticking in or taking out a few commas, changing the word order slightly and/or inserting a couple of your own words in between chunks of someone else's, is still plagiarism. I wonder if the whole thing might have been the result of the mistaken "it's OK if you copy from non-fiction in order to get the details accurate" mindset. Clearly, that's wrong. It's still plagiarism, and authors of non-fiction (as I know from personal experience, since that's what I write) can spend a lot of time trying to polish their prose.
I don't want to boycott the author completely because (a) the book has a very nice example of legitimate intertextuality (b) I'd spent a considerable amount of time working on that before I noticed the illegitimate kind (i.e. plagiarism) and I'd rather not have wasted all that time, (c) I haven't come across another example of the legitimate intertextuality quite like this one, so it wouldn't be easy to find another example and use that instead and (d) the sentences containing plagiarised fragments make up a very, very small proportion of the whole novel.
However, if the fragments of text match those in the EB, what the author did was wrong, and I don't want to let plagiarism pass uncriticised, so although I want to keep in what I've written about the interesting and good bit of the novel, I feel I should acknowledge the big problem in that other section, even though it's not directly relevant to the issue I wanted to write about. I'm currently favouring a compromise solution, which is to footnote the problem. Or would it just be sufficient for me to name and shame the author by posting the passages here, on the blog? Should I boycott her work completely? If I do, should I also boycott all romances which are problematic in other ways (e.g. racist novels or novels written by authors who've done something highly unethical)? Does exposing the problem in this way raise awareness of plagiarism, whereas boycotting an old text and refusing to write about it at all would be a meaningless gesture given that the book has pretty much already been forgotten by most people? Does raising the issue by giving specific instance of it in the romance genre make the genre as a whole look bad? I don't think so, since all kinds of genres, including literary fiction, have had plagiarism scandals.
What do you think?
The painting is of a fresco by Raphael in the Vatican, and is titled "The School of Athens." Many of the figures depict famous philosophers. I found the photo at Wikimedia Commons.
this is an interesting, but probably not fun for you, dilemma.
ReplyDeleteI have two quick opinions on two pieces of it:
1. IMO, you should not mention the plagiarism in your paper, because it is not the right place to address this problem. Your only concern in your ms. is whether the the plagiarism nullifies the novel's status as a worthy subject of your thesis. It doesn't so, don't mention it.
2. You may or may not want to boycott this author because s/he plagiarized. But nothing follows about racism, etc, in books. One offense may rise, for you, to the level of requiring a boycott, and another may not. There's no unavoidable inconsistency there.
3. I haven't thought yet about the central issue, i.e, the best way to address the plagiarism (assuming you find what you expect to find) -- I am sure others will have more helpful comments there -- but you might consider the lessons of the SB exposure of Cassie Edwards (and I am not saying which lessons you should draw) as you mull it over.
I'd use a footnote. I's also (if it was possible) check out some of the author's other works to see if a pattern is spotted. The reason I'd footnote is that whatever you're writing stands on it's own and it's therefore important to have within that document that this source material, while valuable for the reasons cited, may be overall tainted by the following. Since you're using it as an example of something done well, it becomes important to point out what is not acceptable.
ReplyDeleteBoycotting - well, that would depend (to me) on what else you found. If thats it is the sole example in her work, maybe it was an early book and she's learned and grown since 1979. If it's endemic, then yea, and outing her is the way to go.
I would footnote the plagiarism. For one thing, plagiarism is a kind of (negative) intertextuality, and so isn't totally detached from your subject. Also, if someone is inspired by your work to go and read this novel and discovers the same thing you discovered, how will they feel knowing that you either a) didn't see it or b) didn't mention it? How will that omission reflect on your work as a scholar? Accusing someone of plagiarism is never pleasant, but we can't just ignore it.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't suggesting doing nothing (I am not sure WHAT I think Laura's ethical obligation is so far as reporting the plagiarist) but I stand by the claim that a journal article is not the appropriate venue to make an accusation of plagiarism.
ReplyDelete... just because the material appears in Britannica does not necessarily mean it is copyrighted by Britannica.
ReplyDelete"Britannica claims no compilation copyright in images or materials that are subject to the GNU Free Documentation License or similar licenses."
http://corporate.britannica.com/termsofuse.html
It may be a minor issue, but still, I would be very sure the material "plagiarized" is actually copyrighted to Britannica before footnoting or making any other claims.
It makes me very uncomfortable to have to enforce a copyright policy for a giant publisher (which is part of my job responsibilities -- I do it, but I don't enjoy it). Personally, I would far rather be a barking dog for an individual author than a giant conglomerate publisher like Britannica.
Having said that, I pose a question: if you found the material had come verbatim from Wikipedia, what would you do?
Still technically plagiarized -- copied and redistributed for personal profit without acknowledgment -- just not covered by a copyright agreement. (The violation of Wikipedia "copyright" would be the follow-on publisher's limitations of use of the copied material.)
Is it the ethical issues or the legal details that constitute actual plagiarism?
I can see why mentioning the plagiarism in a footnote might be considered inappropriate if the plagiarism's not relevant to the matter being discussed in the body of the text. The issue could possibly be shoehorned in, given that in this case the matter being discussed is intertextuality, but yes, it's a stretch.
ReplyDeleteIf I don't put it in a footnote, some questions that remain are (a) whether I have some ethical obligation to make my findings known somewhere (is remaining silent the literary equivalent of being an accessory to a crime?) and (b) on a practical note, where would be the correct place to do so?
Also, as Sarah suggested, do I have some obligation to readers of the piece in which I mention the good example of intertextuality? Meopta describes the text as "tainted" by plagiarism. I can see why it could be considered that way, and if it is, then offering up one part of the text without commenting on the plagiarism in the other part might be thought of as being a bit like handing someone an apple with a worm in it, but only pointing out the nice, red, juicy bit just above the wormhole.
On the other hand, Jessica is of the opinion that the taint doesn't extend to the part I want to discuss, and that I only have an obligation to direct my readers to the juicy parts of the apple, not to steer them away from wormholes. My guarantee of quality, then, extends only as far as the passages I mention, not to the novel as a whole. And in fact, my guarantee would really only extend as far as the particular aspects of the passages under discussion. If I'm discussing intertextuality, I'm only guaranteeing that there is, in my opinion, some intertextuality in that passage. I'm not necessarily guaranteeing that the passage in question is "well written," for example, or that it doesn't have neo-colonialist overtones, or that it isn't sexist etc. etc.
If one thinks I do have an obligation to protect my readers from the wormy plagiarised parts of the apple, would a mention of my findings on this blog be deemed to have fullfilled my obligation? There's no guarantee those readers will ever notice what I post on my blog, after all. Then again, some people don't read end-notes or footnotes either.
As with the boycotting, if I'm deemed to have an obligation to alert my readers to wormholes, how do I decide which other issues might be considered wormholes? A text might have some lovely imagery in one part, but also contain horribly racist parts. Should I alert readers to that too? In other words, is plagiarism a special case of literary "crime" in which remaining silent implies collusion with the plagiarist? Or are there many areas regarding which the literary critic has an obligation to speak out?
I would tend to think that for reasons of time and space the literary critic can't speak out about everything she reads which she finds ethically questionable/morally repugnant, and she really, really can't speak out about everything in one essay or the essay would end up being incoherent.
As for my reputation, a post about it here would protect my reputation in the sense that no-one could allege that I had willfully concealed a case of plagiarism. That said, plagiarism can be difficult to detect, so I don't think it should be assumed that literary critics, editors etc are failures if we/they don't spot it. However good we are, we can't memorise every possible text that could conceivably be plagiarised by someone.
Firefly asked "if you found the material had come verbatim from Wikipedia, what would you do?" The answer is that I'd have exactly the same ethical problem. I'm not concerned with copyright. That's a legal issue. Many instances of plagiarism are completely impossible to punish by law, but the plagiarism is still considered ethically wrong.
Of course, I don't want to accuse someone of plagiarism and then find myself accused of libel, because that would also be a legal issue, and one that would definitely cause problems for me. It's not really likely to happen, though, and particularly not if I have strong textual evidence.
I would footnote it, personally. I think it's important, especially, as (another) Sarah says, in a paper about intertextuality.
ReplyDeleteOther than that, I really don't know. Interesting questions!
I would tend to think that for reasons of time and space the literary critic can't speak out about everything she reads which she finds ethically questionable/morally repugnant, and she really, really can't speak out about everything in one essay or the essay would end up being incoherent.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point. Although in some cases, I can imagine an author including a disclaimer sentence somewhere that signals "yes, this text is horribly racist but it's examples of landscape description are fascinating" or whatever the particular problem is. I suppose that kind of disclaimer makes more sense if the problem is either already famous (someone who has already been accused of plagiarism, for instance) or very obvious.
In other words, is plagiarism a special case of literary "crime" in which remaining silent implies collusion with the plagiarist? Or are there many areas regarding which the literary critic has an obligation to speak out?
Again, I think it depends on the level of obviousness. Remaining silent about something obvious, like racism, might make a reader wonder why you didn't address it, but the "crime" in that case would not go unnoticed so I think the obligation is less. If it is something like obscure plagiarism, the likelihood is that the "crime" may go unnoticed unless you say something. And isn't it our job as academics, to some extent, to notice and comment on things other people would not? To bring things like this out into the light?
However, it really depends on how much you think it derails your paper, and whether or not you can prove it. It might be something that you shelve for a later piece about the intertextuality of conscious or unconscious borrowing or something like that.
I'm glad you brought this up, though. It's an interesting question to think about and debate. It's giving me lots of interesting ideas for the class on plagiarism I'm teaching tomorrow.
I think whether to raise the issue in an article depends in part on whether it alters your use of the book. Consider a paper with the following paragraph:
ReplyDelete"We observed the stock of fruit at one grocery store. After careful inspection, we concluded that some apples are red. [Photo of red apples.] Over a 24-hour period we observed no change in the quality of the fruit; we then concluded that oranges never go bad."
I would be comfortable citing that paper as a source of evidence that some apples are red. I wouldn't necessarily add that the paper contains some serious methodological errors and questionable conclusions in other fields--but I might; it depends on some additional circumstances and judgment calls. If (a) a great deal of the paper seemed sketchy, (b) the paper was known for such errors, but no other paper had made such a useful finding, or (c) the false conclusion was about my subject--apples--then I would have to cite the paper but would want to put bounds on my reliance on it, e.g. "While there is some controversy over other aspects of the paper, it presents strong evidence that some apples are red."
I agree with Jessica that a journal article may not be the place to first raise the issue, especially when it's a side issue in your work. A footnote also doesn't seem an appropriate place to drop a bombshell. But in that case, what's your next move? I think I would be inclined to take the matter to the author and publisher, and investigate whether it seemed to be a one-time small-scope problem, before going farther. In my sphere, plagiarism is a career-ruining thing, and that places some responsibility on the accuser as well as the accused. (I suppose there's an argument to be made that in romance fiction, plagiarism is *not* a career-ruining thing, but I'm not sure that would change my sense of obligation as the accuser.)
"I suppose it's conceivable that she copied the sentences verbatim from the EB (though she'd have had to just copied out those specific sentences and none of the rest of the article for that to be credible), left them for a while in a pile of papers without annotating the source, then came across them and thought she'd already changed them enough to make them hers, and at that point reworked them slightly. Possible, but not very likely."
That's a nightmare of mine. I can imagine it happening, especially back in the days when research meant a pile of hand-written index cards. Shudder.
While we might all agree that this situation has important ethical issues, I wonder to what degree our response to it is colored by the awareness of plagiarism today? Like so many other aspects of life, I think we need to consider the broader cultural context in which it occurred. Laura, you haven't said very much about the author, other than it isn't anyone famous or with an online presence. I wouldn't be surprised if she really thought she was doing a sufficient job of changing the wording to avoid plagiarism. Remember, this was written at least thirty years ago, at a time when mainstream understanding and awareness of plagiarism was a bit different than it is today. The small changes that you describe sound an awful lot like the way I was taught in middle and high school (back in the 80s) to paraphrase rather than directly quote -- an approach that is markedly different from how I teach undergrads in my writing course today.
ReplyDelete"I suppose it's conceivable that she copied the sentences verbatim from the EB (though she'd have had to just copied out those specific sentences and none of the rest of the article for that to be credible), left them for a while in a pile of papers without annotating the source, then came across them and thought she'd already changed them enough to make them hers, and at that point reworked them slightly. Possible, but not very likely."
I wonder why you think it unlikely that she copied just those sentences from EB, rather than the whole article? In the 1970s, photocopying was more costly than it is today, and copying by hand more information than is necessary is laborious. I can readily imagine that she copied out only the portion of the text she was interested in. And like RtP, I can easily imagine this happening. (Indeed, one of research nightmares is that I look at notes I've already paraphrased, assume I HAVEN'T paraphrased them, rewrite them again, and then end up with something more closely resembling the author's original text.)
If I were to mention it at all, I would limit it to a footnote, but try not to make it one that drops a bomb. Perhaps focus on the correspondences between the words/phrases, but resist making an all-out accusation of plagiarism.
Thanks for all the comments and different perspectives, everyone. This is giving me a lot to think about, and it's really helpful to have so many different viewpoints to consider.
ReplyDeleteRemaining silent about something obvious, like racism, might make a reader wonder why you didn't address it
I'm not at all sure that racism and/or racist stereotypes are always obvious to everyone. I was astonished when I read a recent RITA-winning romance and discovered it to be, in my opinion, full of racial stereotypes. Was I missing something? Or were other people missing something? Either way, I was forced to conclude that the novel hadn't been read in at all the the same way by many, many other readers. And that's a book published in 2006.
For my own part, although I try to be alert to racism, sexism, able-ism, heterosexism, ageism etc in the texts I read, in many of these areas I may be less alert than I should/could be, because I myself am not a member of the particular discriminated-against group being depicted. That's one of the side-effects of privilege (in the sense discussed here where it's applied particularly to race).
I think I would be inclined to take the matter to the author and publisher, and investigate whether it seemed to be a one-time small-scope problem, before going farther.
I don't know if the name under which this book was published was a pseudonym but the author with this name hasn't had any more books published for a long time, as far as I know. It's possible she may still be writing, under a (different) pseudonym.
Meopta mentioned, further up the thread, the possibility of getting hold of her backlist to look for more instances. That would, of course, be possible, but it would involve a lot of work. In addition I couldn't guarantee I'd spot any other instances anyway. I only came across these ones by chance because I Googled to look for more information on the building being described.
Since, as far as I know, this person isn't still writing, I'm not sure it's worth the time and effort to go searching for more instances. When the Smart Bitches compiled their dossier, they had a lot of help from their readers. However, if the general feeling was that I shouldn't "out" this author until I had more evidence,then I'd have to do all that work myself, and it could take months to scrutinise all her novels, copy out by hand all the descriptions of real places and then feed chunks of them through Google to see if any matches come up. Not that laziness is any excuse for inaction when one comes across many instances of immorality, but in this case, would the benefits to society in general outweigh the loss to me of my time? On balance, I'm inclined to think not.
Remember, this was written at least thirty years ago, at a time when mainstream understanding and awareness of plagiarism was a bit different than it is today. The small changes that you describe sound an awful lot like the way I was taught in middle and high school (back in the 80s) to paraphrase rather than directly quote
That's a very interesting point. Just out of curiosity, does anyone have any idea of how, why and when attitudes began to change?
I wonder why you think it unlikely that she copied just those sentences from EB, rather than the whole article? In the 1970s, photocopying was more costly than it is today, and copying by hand more information than is necessary is laborious. I can readily imagine that she copied out only the portion of the text she was interested in.
Well, there are about two pages worth of really quite detailed description of this building and its surroundings (with the occasional bit about the hero and heroine mixed in with that), but only two or three sentences in all that which came up as having bits matching the text in the Encyclopedia. I'd really have to look at a hard copy of the Encyclopedia to be sure, but at the moment it looks as though she managed to paraphrase all of the rest perfectly. If she copied lots of stuff from the Encyclopedia, then she can't have accidentally just copied out a few sentences verbatim.
If she did copy out only a few selected sentences, why did she think she needed to record those particular sentences word for word while relying on her memory for most of the other details (which she presumably also got from the Encyclopedia)? The phrases she's taken verbatim seem to be ones which have a less formal tone or which might be more difficult to paraphrase, which makes me incline towards the idea that she copied out quite a bit more from the Encyclopedia, paraphrased most of it so that it fitted with the novel, and then included verbatim a few sentence fragments that she liked and/or couldn't think how to rephrase in any significantly different manner.
It really isn't like the Cassie Edwards case, where the tone of the passages shifts very, very noticeably as you hit a passage which comes from a work of non-fiction. Nowadays the section in question would probably be labelled "infodump" but that was common then. The section as a whole reads very smoothly as a normal passage of description in a work of fiction. That's why I only noticed the problem when I happened to use Google to look for additional factual information.
Perhaps focus on the correspondences between the words/phrases, but resist making an all-out accusation of plagiarism.
ReplyDeleteYes, I'd been thinking about that possibility. Since I'd be writing about intertextuality, I could find some way of wording my comment which references intertextuality but doesn't explicitly use the word "plagiarism." I could probably manage to say enough, and give enough quotations, to let the reader draw her/his own conclusions.
If I call it "plagiarism" I might need to provide more evidence (i.e. by going through the whole book more carefully and checking her backlist) so as to have ample evidence to back up my accusation.
In addition, if it was the case that "plagiarism" was thought of a little bit differently at the time when the novel was written, it would be more accurate not to label this as "plagiarism" in the modern sense.
Thanks again, everyone. I'm still pondering this, as you can probably tell.
"As we all know, though, using someone else's words while sticking in or taking out a few commas, changing the word order slightly and/or inserting a couple of your own words in between chunks of someone else's, is still plagiarism."
ReplyDeletePart of the problem is that not all know this. I've repeated this several times, because the shock hasn't worn off yet: a person identifying herself as teacher told me last year, during the widespread discussions of the CE discovery, that changing punctuation--specifically inserting commas--was change enough to avoid plagiarizing someone else's text.
If teachers--even if only some teachers--believe that to be true, is it any wonder it happens so much?
Here's a thought -- I wonder if it's possible that both EB and the author got their descriptions of the building from the same source. How important is this building? Might there be some kind of historical/background/technical information available to tourists, visitors, etc.?
ReplyDeletePart of the problem is that not all know this.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, and perhaps your observations also reflect what Linda said about a time when "mainstream understanding and awareness of plagiarism was a bit different than it is today." Or maybe in the past things varied too, just as they still do?
How important is this building? Might there be some kind of historical/background/technical information available to tourists, visitors, etc.?
Eek! If it turned out that there was another source, from which both the Encyclopedia and the author had drawn, that would mean there would have been two instances of plagiarism instead of one. I don't have any evidence of that at all.
It is indeed an important building, and I'm sure there's been plenty written about it. Google Books is getting pretty comprehensive, though, so if there was a book which had exactly the same information, that might have come up in a search. Instead, for some of these phrases (depending on how few words I divided them up into, of course) the Encyclopedia was the only match. It's definitely possible that there were leaflets for tourists, but I'd have expected the Encyclopedia's authors to have drawn from more authoritative sources. Those would tend to be books, which is why if a book was the original source, it might have turned up in a Google search too. Of course, not everything has been scanned in by Google, at least not yet! ;-)
Well, I wouldn't want to be you! I don't know if I can judge without seeing the actual text, but I assume you've found a genuine example. Uh oh. Is the author still writing?
ReplyDeleteSo, yeah, I have no advice, but I will share this: In my English 101class in good old community college, a girl was flunked because of ONE WORD. This may seem overboard, on the part of the teacher, but the student didn't even know what the word MEANT. She copied it right from her book to the paper. It may have been within a lifted phrase, to be accurately called plagiarism, but she was caught because of that particular word.
This girl asked me to evaluate the situation, because I was a literature nerd who knew about such things, and I told her I thought the teacher was in the right.
This is an extreme case, of course, but I think of it every time the subject comes up. I'm very sensitive about using technical terms or anything I've learned from research. We have to be careful with every. single. word.
Well, I wouldn't want to be you! [...] Uh oh. Is the author still writing?
ReplyDeleteNo, I'm not enjoying the dilemma much. I may mentally hide it away and try to forget about it for a while, as I still don't know what to do. It's not urgent though, as (a) the book is very old (for a romance) and out of print (b) the author isn't, as far as I know, still writing and (c) the thing I'm working on and in which I quote from this novel is very, very, very far from finished.
Next fall, I'll have a collection of stories and novellas (1635: The Tangled Web) coming out from Baen.
ReplyDeleteOne of the, Franconia!, will probably give the literary critics nervous prostration. One of the "historical down-timer" characters who appears in the story is the Jacobean/Carolingian playwright Philip Massinger. As far as I could (I couldn't always), I have the dialogue coming from his mouth consist of lines, or paraphrased lines, from his plays -- sometimes wildly out of context, of course, as when he compliments his up-timer hostess on the quince jam and breakfast.
I acknowledge the general usage of his works in a little note at the end, but it would ruin the whole story for readers if I footnoted every individual line.
Franconia!, will probably give the literary critics nervous prostration.
ReplyDeleteI think there have been novels published which do something similar. As far as I know, Amanda Grange's series of novels, based on Austen's novels, use Austen's words at times. I could be wrong about that. And even if they do, they wouldn't be taking the words out of context, so that's a bit different from what your work.
I have the impression that the film Shakespeare in Love might do something a bit similar to what you're describing.
I personally wouldn't have any problem with it, because you "acknowledge the general usage of his works in a little note at the end." If the readers know that you're using quotes from his works then, if they want to, they can go and look them up and treat it as a game. If they can't be bothered, they don't have to. Either way, you're not pretending to have written all the words spoken by that character and you've acknowledged their real source.
I posted a bit too soon. The phrase "so that's a bit different from what your work" should read "so that's a bit different from your work."
ReplyDelete