Plagiarism

A longtime Towson University professor has resigned his post as the head of the city school system's ethics panel amid allegations that his published academic articles contain content from dozens of sources without proper - or in some cases any - attribution. University officials and journal publishers say they are reviewing several articles submitted by Benjamin A. Neil, a legal affairs professor, after a librarian at another university alerted them to the issue. A Baltimore Sun review of five papers published by Neil shows passages with identical language and others with close similarities to scholarly journals, news publications, congressional testimony, blogs and websites.

Just hours after The Baltimore Sun broke the news that a longtime Towson University professor, Benjamin Neil, was under investigation for allegations that he plagiarized several of his academic articles, the city schools ethics panel webpage underwent a rapid revision. The Sun had been investigating several of Neil's papers for more than a week when it received word that Neil, who had denied any wrongdoing in a March 25 interview, had resigned his post as the chair of the school district's ethics panel.

UPDATE: See end of post for update on another journalist saying Zakaria "borrowed heavily" from him. Following the lead of Time magazine, CNN Friday suspended Sunday morning show host and international affairs analyst Fareed Zakaria for plagiarism. The magazine said its suspension was for a month "pending further review," while CNN put no time limit on its removal of Zakaria from its airwaves. Plagiarism used to be a deadly journalistic sin from which there often was no redemption.  Given the lack of values and ethics in journalism today, however, who knows what will happen to Zakaria.

A Denver-based scholarly librarian leveled plagiarism allegations against a Towson University professor after doing research for his watchdog blog and alerting university officials, journals and The Baltimore Sun. Towson is reviewing the work of legal affairs professor Benjamin A. Neil, who says that he has done nothing wrong and that the issue is a matter of "style and formatting. " Jeffrey Beall, an academic librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, specializes in scrutinizing publishers who make content available for free online but require authors to pay a fee when their articles are accepted into a journal.

ONCE UPON a time, there was a very little boy with a very large forehead who lived in West Baltimore. One day his mommy moved him and his five brothers and sisters to the Forest Park section of Northwest Baltimore. The kid with the big forehead - me - attended Mordechai Gist Elementary School. As a sixth-grader, I and the rest of the class were given an assignment: Write an original story. My lazy, no-good bum side got the better of me. Rather than think of an original story, I decided to repeat one I'd read in a book when I attended one of the schools in my old neighborhood.

Walter W. Stewart and Ned Feder have created a device whose birth students have dreaded for as long as there have been term papers: a plagiarism-sniffing machine.But Mr. Stewart, a chemist, and Dr. Feder, a physician and cell biologist, have discovered that sometimes the world doesn't put down its clubs after beating a path to the door of better mouse trap builders.After some big-name scientists and a prominent historian complained that their exposes were giving scholarship a bad name, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, where Mr. Stewart and Dr. Feder were researchers, told them that their laboratory was being closed.

A Naval Academy professor who was accused of plagiarism will get a chance to revise his book, which was withdrawn from bookstores this week. Michael Pietsch of Little, Brown and Co., said yesterday that he had taken the rare step of recalling Pandora's Keepers: Nine Men and the Atomic Bomb to give author Brian VanDeMark time to make revisions. The book will be reissued in paperback within a year. "Brian VanDeMark is a very serious researcher and writer, and he wrote an excellent book in which there are errors of omission," Pietsch said in a phone interview.

A Naval Academy history professor accused of plagiarizing portions of his book on the atomic bomb was punished yesterday with a demotion, a loss of tenure and a hefty pay cut. The military college said yesterday that its five-month inquiry into the book by professor Brian VanDeMark concluded that the numerous phrases similar or identical to those of other authors were a result of "gross carelessness," not deliberate theft. "It was just very sloppy scholarship," William C. Miller, the college's academic dean and provost, said in an interview.

For being "just words," they're sure stirring up some controversy. Critics of Sen. Barack Obama are pointing to the similarity between one of the Democratic presidential hopeful's signature speeches and an address that Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick gave in 2006. Although Patrick, who is close with Obama and shares his heavyweight political adviser, says he gave his friend permission to borrow his lines, that isn't stopping accusations of plagiarism. Last weekend in Wisconsin, responding to statements from rival Sen. Hillary Clinton that she offers solutions while Obama merely "makes speeches," Obama told a stirred-up crowd, "Don't tell me words don't matter."

In the span of several months in early 2002, two of the country's most famous historians were exposed as plagiarizers. Both Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, it was revealed, had borrowed liberally from lesser-known writers without proper attribution. At the time, I followed the controversies just closely enough to know that the misdeeds seemed to fall into a gray area. Both writers claimed their failures had been ones of sloppiness, not outright thievery; they had mixed up their notes and simply forgotten to add some quote marks and footnotes.

A longtime Towson University professor has resigned his post as the head of the city school system's ethics panel amid allegations that his published academic articles contain content from dozens of sources without proper - or in some cases any - attribution. University officials and journal publishers say they are reviewing several articles submitted by Benjamin A. Neil, a legal affairs professor, after a librarian at another university alerted them to the issue. A Baltimore Sun review of five papers published by Neil shows passages with identical language and others with close similarities to scholarly journals, news publications, congressional testimony, blogs and websites.

Yesterday, writing at Poynter.org , Roy Peter Clark suggested that our current attitudes about plagiarism have conflated relatively minor or innocuous literary borrowings with serious thefts. One of the points he identified was the clamor about self-plagiarism. After quoting him, I'd like to add some observations. Actually, he begins by quoting Judge Richard A. Posner 's Little Book of Plagiarism : "Posner hits the target on this one: 'The temptation to lump distinct practices in with plagiarism should be resisted for the sake of clarity; "self-plagiarism," for example, should be recognized as a distinct practice and rarely an objectionable one.' All successful writers 're-purpose' their work for profit and influence, but they should always be forthright with potential publishers on whether the work is brand new or recycled.

UPDATE: See end of post for update on another journalist saying Zakaria "borrowed heavily" from him. Following the lead of Time magazine, CNN Friday suspended Sunday morning show host and international affairs analyst Fareed Zakaria for plagiarism. The magazine said its suspension was for a month "pending further review," while CNN put no time limit on its removal of Zakaria from its airwaves. Plagiarism used to be a deadly journalistic sin from which there often was no redemption.  Given the lack of values and ethics in journalism today, however, who knows what will happen to Zakaria.

For being "just words," they're sure stirring up some controversy. Critics of Sen. Barack Obama are pointing to the similarity between one of the Democratic presidential hopeful's signature speeches and an address that Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick gave in 2006. Although Patrick, who is close with Obama and shares his heavyweight political adviser, says he gave his friend permission to borrow his lines, that isn't stopping accusations of plagiarism. Last weekend in Wisconsin, responding to statements from rival Sen. Hillary Clinton that she offers solutions while Obama merely "makes speeches," Obama told a stirred-up crowd, "Don't tell me words don't matter."

July is shaping up to be the cruelest month for Avril Lavigne. Over the past two weeks, the pop princess' carefully crafted image as the anti-Britney Spears - that is, a chart-topping ingenue who writes her own songs, spits at paparazzi and has shaped her own spiky-yet-vulnerable image - has come under attack on multiple fronts. In a lawsuit made public last week, the 22-year-old Canadian superstar is being sued for copyright infringement. She's accused of plagiarizing a substantial part of "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend," a song by '70s new wave group the Rubinoos, for her hit "Girlfriend."

The Little Book of Plagiarism By Richard A. Posner Pantheon / 116 pages / $10.95 At 116 pages - and small pages at that - Richard A. Posner's The Little Book of Plagiarism is aptly titled. It's a brief but provocative and illuminating meditation on the current craze for searching out, denouncing and punishing authors who appear to have borrowed the work of others and passed it off as their own. Ever the controversialist, Posner is willing to entertain the idea that plagiarism is hardly the high crime that moralists in the news media and the academy advertise it as, and he makes a good case for the notion that copying is (and always has been)

St. John's College in Annapolis, known for teaching liberal arts students to think creatively, has revoked a student's 1997 bachelor's degree for plagiarism in what college officials say is the only such incident in recent memory.The student also was expelled and her senior essay prize taken away, college officials said. One of three senior essay prize winners last year, the student copied substantial portions of a prize-winning senior essay that was written about 20 years ago on the same work of fiction.

Scientific misconduct may be far more extensive than the occasional high-profile cases of fabricated research or plagiarism, according to survey results published in today's issue of the journal Nature. That's because scientists appear to be engaging far more often in "mundane" kinds of scientific wrongdoing - transgressions that could be an even greater threat to science, authors from the University of Minnesota and a Minneapolis research foundation conclude. The researchers found that 33 percent of the scientists surveyed admitted to engaging in at least one of 10 research misbehaviors in the previous three years.

In the span of several months in early 2002, two of the country's most famous historians were exposed as plagiarizers. Both Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, it was revealed, had borrowed liberally from lesser-known writers without proper attribution. At the time, I followed the controversies just closely enough to know that the misdeeds seemed to fall into a gray area. Both writers claimed their failures had been ones of sloppiness, not outright thievery; they had mixed up their notes and simply forgotten to add some quote marks and footnotes.