Hello!

 

My thanks as well for all of the comments.  They will certainly help me further explain this phenomenon to my students. 

 

Just to wax nostalgic for a moment, I remember being taught not to steal other people’s ideas back in elementary school (and that was  35-30 years ago).  Now I know we’re talking about a variety of things here (expressing things as they do in one’s professional community, boilerplate phrases, cognitive appropriacy of tasks) and I think these are all valid things in academic writing at the higher education level.  However,  it boggles the mind as to why are we dealing with the basic concept of plagiarism at the university level. 

Now I know my rant is not going to solve anything (but it feels good to rant) and the reality is such that we Academic Writing teachers (aka police) are the last line of defence against this sort of thing but, as a relatively new teacher of Academic Writing, I just feel that we’re a bit high on the food chain for this.   

 

I realize that different cultures deal with plagiarism in different ways (I’m Canadian and I teach students from many different countries) but I would have hoped that academic integrity is globally held in somewhat higher esteem than it appears to be.  What happened? Why aren’t teachers in earlier levels of education saying anything about this? Or are they? And if so, what are they saying?  This directly concerns point 3 of Mary Ellen’s summed up points below.  Why isn’t “the sense of how to clearly mark off your own ideas and others’ and when… strong in many sciences now”? (Kerans, 2010) J

 

…end of rant.

 

Happy spring!

--Paula

 

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Paula Haapanen
Coordinating Lecturer - English
Language Centre
Lappeenranta University of Technology

PO Box 20
53851 Lappeenranta
Finland

Phone: + 358 (0)5 621 2213 (direct)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you for this because you emphasize some points I’ve tried to bring to instruction (now from an outsider’s vantage in the world of author’s editing – i.e., pre-acceptance editing – and journal copyediting – though I still teach a bit). May I summarize your points that I consider to be very important to remember when planning instruction or orienting (advanced) students? In this, I’m attempting to state the “problems” and imply the solutions for instructors or mentors from the journal editors’ point of view as I understand it.

 

1. Long noun phrases are common and can be considered to have status as terms in many fields. (Yes, they could be shortened after they’ve first been established in a text, but they need to appear in their entirety somewhere; otherwise reading is made difficult.) This is why the “six-word string” criterion of some plagiarism detection software won’t be very useful. It’s also why all electronic detection outputs should be interpreted by a human being who is familiar with the literature in the field, before plagiarism is assumed.
2. Certain longish predicate phrases or clauses, especially in the methods and results sections, should also be given the status of “boilerplate phrases” equivalent to the sort John pointed out yesterday as useful metalinguistic phrases for linking ideas. (There are just so many ways to express statistical results, for example, and to deviate is to change the meaning or display your lack of knowledge of a technique and how it’s talked about in that community.) Furthermore, certain multicenter studies will have whole paragraphs that are boilerplates – to tie a vast body of research together. A human interpreter of plagiarism detection software outputs needs to know this.
3. “Words unacknowledged” = plagiarism is a fair way to put it, OK. However, many of us are dealing with authors who are learning from mentors who themselves don’t know much about citing (acknowledgment protocols) and when to put quotes around exact wording. There are few examples to follow in the sciences—for both good and bad reasons. (Note how often applied linguists even put quotes around two-to-four word phrases to express that a turn of phrase belongs to the cited author, possibly because research on the ground is thin as you say. Quotes around short segments seldom appear in the sciences, and when they do, they’re often so-called scare quotes suggesting disagreement or lack of evidence. Lack of quotes is appropriate if the scientist is using the type of phrasing mentioned in points 1 and 2 above. On other occasions – the expression of points of view or interpretation or when clause-length explanations are incorporated, it probably would be necessary to acknowledge that phrasing is exact and just putting a cite at the end of a sentence is insufficient.) A problem is that where lines are drawn isn’t being well handed down in many settings nowadays. The sense of how to clearly mark off your own ideas and others’ and when phrasing matters isn’t strong in many sciences now.
4. I think you’re so very right that tasks that are often not really within the cognitive abilities of undergraduates are being set these days in university classes (and not just EAP courses). Fixing this alone would solve many problems. What’s needed are tasks requiring “bridge genres” – ways students can practice and gradually build up a sense of how to use the language to participate in their field.
5. I also think it’s right to warn instructors off overemphasizing paraphrasing activities as the best response to avoidance of plagiarism on the student level (you say “EAP teachers get hung up on the words rather than ideas or findings“) . Plagiarism disappears from the classroom (in my experience) when the task set is cognitively appropriate and when a student writer focuses on the idea he or she wishes to explain – to an appropriately imagined reader, such as a smart younger cousin who’s also interested in the field. Soon, natural marking of “my idea” vs “their ideas/facts” emerges from the student’s words and citing begins to make sense to them. (In engineering, by the way, I find the tasks set by Michael Alley and the groups he works with to be the type of bridge task I’m talking about.)

 

The only contributions I’d like to add:

 

1)    I think that some of the repetition I think you’re seeing in your Google searches is a result of the fact that “compilation theses” (Am: dissertations) are increasingly common. In case anyone’s not familiar with this practice, essentially the doctoral student must publish the articles first, before “writing” (compiling) the thesis/dissertation. Then, the thesis itself is a compilation of those articles – in their exact forms – plus an introductory chapter summarizing the history and subsequent events in the field, plus the usual acknowledgements. This certainly isn’t plagiarism. It’s “complilation”.

2)    The hope that (“The Journal obviously doesn't think this is plagiarism”) may be optimistic because reviewers do not detect plagiarism. This is the ostensible reason why journal editors are now becoming more indignant about both duplicate publication and plagiarism (hence the CrossCheck publisher’s project). The community still views this as a transgression, however. Sometimes editors go on the rampage. Sometimes they get the tone of their reactions wrong. (See last year’s fiasco reported in Nature, 30 July 2009, Abbot), so young authors who see their mentors have been copy-pasting for years may be rudely undercut at some point. COPE has a flowchart with a protocol for editors to follow, but few editors are members of COPE!

 

 

Finally: “boilerplate” comes from the practice of newspaper printers using heavy (boilerplate) steel to set certain parts of a newspaper that would have to be reprinted often – like mastheads. (Just thought someone might find that tidbit interesting.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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