How plagairism ruined my day ...

I am dismayed. A book that I read recently, and recommended to numerous people, has been yanked from the shelves and is under scrutiny for misrepresentation and possible plagiarism. The author is accused of citing his own work without giving credit to the publication. You can read the article in the WSJ blog here Lehrer. It seems that the research presented in the book is accurate, it is the examples that are a problem. However, any fabrication casts doubt on the entire work. Really?! Why did he do this? This work is interesting and stands up well without fabricating what someone said or didn’t say. Why not give yourself credit?

This situation leads me to think about plagiarism, it isn’t clear that Lehrer did commit plagiarism but his fabrication fits in a similar category. Authors and publishers deserve credit for the work they have done. It isn’t hard and it doesn’t take away from the writer to give credit for source information. Plagiarism takes many forms and can be hard to identify. In the case of Lehrer, the manuscript went through many hands and no one identified the problems. It was a reader who brought the situation forward. Now it is after publication and the damage is done.

I mentioned that giving credit isn’t hard, but it is another step in the process and can be time consuming. Through my work as a team leader for the ACMPE fellowship papers I have the honor of reading a lot of outlines and final manuscripts. Colleagues are working hard to create a document that demonstrates their skill and contribution to the profession. I value that hard work. What is sad is when the authors don’t take that one step to give credit to the ideas and work of others. A common problem is when an author will make a bold statement such as “the majority of physicians do not support the Affordable Healthcare Act”. How does the author know this? Likely the author has not asked all the physicians. Perhaps a survey was conducted and the results suggest that a percentage fit that description. The author needs to cite the survey results. Give credit where credit is due. Perhaps the author only believes this to be true, and so it needs to be stated as an opinion.

A more subtle form of plagiarism is when the author quotes another person’s work but implies it is paraphrased by the way it is cited. This is much harder to find because the reader would have to know exactly how it was originally written. Another version is to quote someone else’s paraphrase of an original work. Whew! This is getting challenging. Fortunately the Internet is capturing an increasing volume of written work and tools are available to match documents with previously published works. Tools are available to check against documents on the Internet. Other tools let you compare documents you have in your computer (using this would have prevented Lehrer from not citing his own work). It is worth the time to check your documents and it is a demonstration of professionalism to respect the work of others.

Whew! I got that off my chest.