andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-400 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: A recent story about academic plagiarism spurred me to some more general thoughts about the intellectual benefits of not giving a damn. I’ll briefly summarize the plagiarism story and then get to my larger point. Copying big blocks of text from others’ writings without attribution Last month I linked to the story of Frank Fischer, an elderly professor of political science who was caught copying big blocks of text (with minor modifications) from others’ writings without attribution. Apparently there’s some dispute about whether this constitutes plagiarism. On one hand, Harvard’s policy is that “in academic writing, it is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source in your paper.” On the other hand, several of Fischer’s colleagues defend him by saying, “Mr. Fischer sometimes used the words of other authors. . . ” They also write: The essence of plagiarism is passing off someone else’s work as
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1 A recent story about academic plagiarism spurred me to some more general thoughts about the intellectual benefits of not giving a damn. [sent-1, score-0.276]
2 I’ll briefly summarize the plagiarism story and then get to my larger point. [sent-2, score-0.2]
3 Copying big blocks of text from others’ writings without attribution Last month I linked to the story of Frank Fischer, an elderly professor of political science who was caught copying big blocks of text (with minor modifications) from others’ writings without attribution. [sent-3, score-2.117]
4 On one hand, Harvard’s policy is that “in academic writing, it is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source in your paper. [sent-5, score-0.386]
5 ” They also write: The essence of plagiarism is passing off someone else’s work as your own, and Mr. [sent-10, score-0.158]
6 In any case, I’ll avoid the whole “plagiarism” concept by saying “copying big blocks of text from others’ writings (with minor modifications) without attribution. [sent-15, score-0.958]
7 Copying big blocks of text (with minor modifications) from others’ writings without attribution. [sent-17, score-0.958]
8 Copying big blocks of text (with minor modifications) from others’ writings (with minor modifications) without attribution. [sent-18, score-1.148]
9 Copying big blocks of text from others’ writings (with minor modifications) without attribution. [sent-19, score-0.958]
10 Copying big blocks of text (with minor modifications) from others’ writings without attribution. [sent-20, score-0.958]
11 It just doesn’t matter to him and so he can feel free to be direct, without any need to overstate his case. [sent-26, score-0.168]
12 Compare this passage from Fischer’s colleagues: So this is at most a misdemeanor of literary style, admitted and regretted, and finding 19 instances of it in five books does not appear particularly remarkable. [sent-27, score-0.277]
13 This is a minor issue, and it is distracting us from the main game. [sent-28, score-0.19]
14 2-51 of our report constitute plagiarism as defined by the codes of academic integrity at Rutgers University (Fischer’s employer) and virtually every other American university. [sent-30, score-0.234]
15 Sokal isn’t trying so hard to win the argument, so he can be direct (for example, discussing his own guesswork involved in selecting articles to compare), whereas Fischer’s defenders, who care so much, have to invent concepts such as “a misdemeanor of literary style. [sent-35, score-0.178]
16 The answer is that plagiarism is not principally an offense against one’s employer–or even against the person whose words are plagiarized–but is rather an offense against the ethical norms of the scholarly community as a whole . [sent-37, score-0.403]
17 Academia, like other pursuits, will always have its share of time-servers and paper-pushers, but it is a bit disturbing to find a scholarly journal edited by somebody who violates scholarly practices. [sent-45, score-0.18]
18 We’re talking about copying big blocks of text (with minor modifications) from others’ writings without attribution, which, at the very least, would seem to add noise rather than signal to the academic conversation. [sent-46, score-1.243]
19 The lawyer from the other side kept asking me what seemed to be barbed or trick questions, and I kept simply answering directly. [sent-48, score-0.143]
20 I would’ve felt too much pressure to be strategic, to overstate my case or to hold things back or to volunteer additional information, But since I was just doing my job, I could just do it. [sent-53, score-0.171]
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Introduction: Frank Fischer, a political scientist at Rutgers U., says his alleged plagiarism was mere sloppiness and not all that uncommon in scholarship. I’ve heard about plagiarism but I had no idea it occurred in political science.
Introduction: As regular readers of this blog are aware, I am fascinated by academic and scientific cheating and the excuses people give for it. Bruno Frey and colleagues published a single article (with only minor variants) in five different major journals, and these articles did not cite each other. And there have been several other cases of his self-plagiarism (see this review from Olaf Storbeck). I do not mind the general practice of repeating oneself for different audiences—in the social sciences, we call this Arrow’s Theorem —but in this case Frey seems to have gone a bit too far. Blogger Economic Logic has looked into this and concluded that this sort of common practice is standard in “the context of the German(-speaking) academic environment,” and what sets Frey apart is not his self-plagiarism or even his brazenness but rather his practice of doing it in high-visibility journals. Economic Logic writes that “[Frey's] contribution is pedagogical, he found a good and interesting
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Introduction: I’ve been blogging a lot lately about plagiarism (sorry, Bob!), and one thing that’s been bugging me is, why does it bother me so much. Part of the story is simple: much of my reputation comes from the words I write, so I bristle at any attempt to devalue words. I feel the same way about plagiarism that a rich person would feel about counterfeiting: Don’t debase my currency! But it’s more than that. After discussing this a bit with Thomas Basbøll, I realized that I’m bothered by the way that plagiarism interferes with the transmission of information: Much has been written on the ethics of plagiarism. One aspect that has received less notice is plagiarism’s role in corrupting our ability to learn from data: We propose that plagiarism is a statistical crime. It involves the hiding of important information regarding the source and context of the copied work in its original form. Such information can dramatically alter the statistical inferences made about the work. In statisti
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