Posted on 05/31/2003 6:39:45 PM PDT by D. Brian Carter
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The nation's largest group of professional historians has scrapped the way it handles plagiarism allegations, doing away with secret proceedings in an effort to spotlight problems when they arise.
The American Historical Association decided to end its 15-year practice of adjudication, where complaints were heard, discussed and decided behind closed doors. The focus now will be to educate historians, students and the public.
The change comes after high-profile plagiarism cases involving historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and the late Stephen Ambrose, as well as former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair.
On Saturday, The New York Times reported that a new book about the birth of the atomic bomb has more than 30 passages that are identical or almost identical to work in four books by other historians.
U.S. Naval Academy historian Brian VanDeMark, 42, author of "Pandora's Keepers: Nine Men and the Atomic Bomb," told the Times that detached readers would consider most of the suspect passages as "reasonable paraphrases." Other passages will have to be "reworded or credited in a footnote," he said.
The policy shift on plagiarism investigations had been under consideration since early last year, association officials said. It was put to a vote this month.
The process of hearing and judging plagiarism and misconduct allegations was very cumbersome, said Arnita Jones, the association's executive director. It required "significant resources that we don't have," she said.
A panel of six association members who judged the cases would spend months hearing a complaint and then responses and rebuttals from the accuser and the accused before discussing the allegations, which would take several more months. There was no outside investigation because the association lacked the staff and funding.
William Cronon, vice president of the organization's professional division, said the need for due process also meant the proceedings were kept from the public. Eventually, he said, the group concluded the adjudicating wasn't having much of an impact.
After the findings were rendered, the complainant and the accused were informed of the panel's decision and could then discuss the case publicly, although they mostly did not. There was no punishment or sanctions.
The association is turning its attention now to raising awareness of plagiarism and misconduct, revising guidelines on handling plagiarism and sponsoring forums on the problem, Cronon said.
"I feel pretty comfortable that those are good roles where we can make a difference," he said.
The group plans to publish advisory documents on plagiarism and misconduct to help better educate historians and the public. It will also develop teaching materials to train students about the dangers of plagiarism.
Columbia University history professor Eric Foner, a former president of the association, said the organization shouldn't be expected to mete out punishment.
"Publicity is the best way to handle" plagiarism, he said.
The Goodwin and Ambrose cases never came before the association.
Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, acknowledged last year that parts of her book, "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys," were taken from another author without proper attribution. She said the copying was accidental.
Ambrose admitted that some sentences in his best seller "The Wild Blue" were taken from another book about World War II bomber pilots.
In another case that made national headlines, Emory University professor Michael Bellesiles resigned after questions about his research for the gun book, "Arming America." Columbia University rescinded its prestigious Bancroft Prize for the book.
Most recently, The New York Times was rocked by a scandal involving Blair, who resigned after the newspaper found fraud, plagiarism and inaccuracies in dozens of his articles.
'Nuff said...
A panel of six association members who judged the cases would spend months hearing a complaint and then responses and rebuttals from the accuser and the accused before discussing the allegations, which would take several more months. There was no outside investigation because the association lacked the staff and funding.
Seems easily remedied to me. If someone suspects someone else of plagiarism they should cite the relevant passages, chapters, etc., present from where/whom it was plagiarized with the associated material and then the judges take a look. It is obvious when something has been copied and it should not take months to present cases and make a decision.
It seems that a good way to do that is to compress the two files as strongly as computationally practicable, then compare the size of the result with the size of the combination of the two files. If one file is a duplicate of the other, a strong compression of the combination would be practically the same size as the compression of one of them individiually.
But they do have the funds for turning its attention now to raising awareness of plagiarism and misconduct, revising guidelines on handling plagiarism and sponsoring forums on the problem, Cronon said.
For example, I just completed a conservative U.S. history "textbook." I had 9-10 standard texts around me, both for information purposes and to make sure I wasn't copying verbatim without a note. I'd write something I thought was "new," only to find that at least one other source had it pretty close.
As a result, I have begun footnoting damn near everything.
Lol...of course not. When Brian Lamb asked Eric about his father, Foner said he had been persecuted during the MCarthy era because he was a man of social conscious.
The Foner brothers--Jack, Phil & Moe--were high up in the Communist Party USA.
In the 1960s, Eric was a Stalinist. After 9/11, Foner wrote in the London Review of Books:
"I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.
Of course, had he been a Republican he would have been run out of public life.
Ah, what gracious condescension!
"A footnote in a book is like a knock on the downstairs door on your honeymoon."- Mark Twain
I have also spent numerous hours of pure enjoyment reading the efforts of Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton.
Something I have noticed about these non-fiction or documentary authors, at least among the very good ones. They immerse themselves in their work. By that I mean they don't look on history so much as events and dates as history is people. Furthermore, they have to bring some perspective or theory to their effort in order to make it different from what has been done before, and to make it interesting.
It also seems to me that, at some level, they become the people that are their subjects. They try to get into the brain and heart and soul of their subjects. That makes it interesting.
I have this theory that what sometimes happens when these folks have studied a subject from a dozen different angles, and read and reread an account perhaps a dozen different times, that they fold the research into some crease in the brain. I doubt that any of these people would ever deliberately plagiarize another author. I have seen them attribute other authors so often in their books that it simply would not make sense to plagiarize just some small aspect for their books. That makes no sense at all.
I think it's more an accident than anything else. That doesn't make it right. When discovered, it also makes me think some royalty needs to be sent the way of the original author. However, I'm tempted to cut just a bit of slack to the author accused of plagiarism provided it's an isolated case, and provided they work hard to maintain a reputation for honor, and step up to take responsibility when some "plagiarism" is discovered.
I think it's possible to make a true mistake in attribution. The important thing to do is acknowledge similarities, and continue to make every effort to avoid such things in the future.
That can only work if you have two things - one, you need the source you think the work was plagiarized from, for comparison, and two, you are relying on the plagiarizer to essentially copy passages verbatim. If there's even a moderate amount of paraphrasing, I don't think you'll be able to flag it, even if the basic idea is lifted wholesale from somewhere else.
Very often, what will happen is that the instructor - and yes, I've graded papers often enough to know this myself - will suspect that the student is plagiarizing ideas from elsewhere, but not actually know the source of the plagiarism. So, in answer to that, one system I've seen implemented in a few places is a test for stylistic agreement between the passages and the author.
Here's how it works - you take the paper that you think is suspicious, and you pick ten or twenty sentences from it at random, and from each sentence, you eliminate a single word, especially descriptive words like adjectives and adverbs, and then you ask the student to fill in the blank. Now, a person who created a paper as his or her own original work will be able to reliably fill in the correct missing word upwards of 90% of the time, or more if it was recently written and is still fresh in his mind. But a person who did a significant amount of plagiarizing and/or paraphrasing will score much more poorly on such a test, very often only filling in the correct word less than 50% of the time - not surprising, since if they didn't write it, they're really more or less guessing about someone else's style of writing, and simply putting in words that fit the context.
The authors claimed that they had one significant anomaly when using the system--that there was a case of a computer programming asignment in which their compression system flagged two students' work as being highly suspicious when the instructor couldn't see significant correlation between the two. In that case they finally gave the students immunity and asked them what they had done. The students asserted under those conditions that they had discussed the approach to the solution of the assigned problem, then each had worked independently.Interesting, anyway . . .
BTW if you're interested, the title of the article wasn't about plagarism but about chain letters--they had about 30 instances of the same chain letter, with variations due to the fact that they were done without computer technology. It even was translated into a different language! Author had just idly kept the things, then became interested in using the compression scheme to analyze which versions were derived from which others. the envelopes with postmarks hadn't been saved so the letters were undated . . .
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