andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1588 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Part 1. The ideal policy Basbøll, as always, gets right to the point: Andrew Gelman is not the plagiarism police because there is no such thing as the plagiarism police. But, he continues: There is, at any self-respecting university and any self-respecting academic journal, a plagiarism policy, and there sure as hell is a “morality” of writing in the world of scholarship. The cardinal rule is: don’t use other people’s words or ideas without attributing those words or ideas to the people you got them from. What to do when the plagiarism (or, perhaps, sloppy quotation, to use a less loaded word) comes to light? Everyone makes mistakes, but if you make one you have to correct it. Don’t explain why your mistake isn’t very serious or “set things right” by pointing to the “obvious” signs of your good intentions. . . . Don’t say you’ve cleared it with the original author. The real victim of your crime is not the other writer; it’s your reader. That’s whose trust you’ve be
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 The ideal policy Basbøll, as always, gets right to the point: Andrew Gelman is not the plagiarism police because there is no such thing as the plagiarism police. [sent-2, score-1.036]
2 But, he continues: There is, at any self-respecting university and any self-respecting academic journal, a plagiarism policy, and there sure as hell is a “morality” of writing in the world of scholarship. [sent-3, score-0.455]
3 What to do when the plagiarism (or, perhaps, sloppy quotation, to use a less loaded word) comes to light? [sent-5, score-0.558]
4 The example Basbøll’s discussion arose out of a case I posted the other day, not an example I was personally aware of but an instance of minor plagiarism that someone sent in to me in unofficial role as “not the plagiarism police. [sent-18, score-1.217]
5 ” My post elicited a range of comments, with some people saying that the published paper should be corrected to make the sourcing more clear, and others saying that the copying was no big deal. [sent-19, score-0.284]
6 Several hours after my entry had been posted, I received a friendly email from one of the authors of the article: Just want to set things right: our paper is an experimental test of the JPE modeling paper. [sent-22, score-0.403]
7 And so I would change my above “it does seem a bit tacky” sentence to: “It seems like a mistake to not use quotation marks, even in a case such as this where the work is clearly labeled as following up from an earlier paper. [sent-31, score-0.391]
8 ” I did not say that the unsourced quotation was not plagiarism, but I felt that it was not such a problem, hence I felt that the email I’d received had cleared things up. [sent-32, score-0.636]
9 That said, just as I am not the plagiarism police, I’m not the plagiarism arbiter, and me saying it’s ok doesn’t make it ok. [sent-33, score-0.972]
10 Perhaps one problem is the analogy of plagiarism to theft. [sent-35, score-0.511]
11 Instead, maybe we should analogize plagiarism to breaking a dish, which it’s possible to do by accident or even unknowingly via sloppy behavior (I say this as someone who is sloppy and breaks things sometimes). [sent-39, score-0.901]
12 If I break a dish, I feel bad and I apologize, but I don’t feel like a bad person, I just see it as part of the cost of doing business, given my general level of obliviousness. [sent-40, score-0.299]
13 When I received that email, I felt bad, in that I had singled out these authors (although not mentioning them by name, but that was not hard to find via google). [sent-43, score-0.256]
14 Several months ago I had an unrelated instance of a blog post that annoyed someone who sent me an obnoxious cease-and-desist style email. [sent-46, score-0.367]
15 For example, Mark Hauser didn’t share his data, then denied and denied, even when his own lab assistants were telling their stories. [sent-49, score-0.304]
16 Ed Wegman did a Chris Rock and denied even after the evidence was obvious, and he also threw a former student under the bus, even though there were several instances of plagiarism in Wegman-authored publications not involving that student. [sent-51, score-0.705]
17 Karl Weick, when is plagiarism was uncovered, bobbed and weaved, got cute, and never apologized or explained. [sent-52, score-0.585]
18 In the example discussed above the authors seem reasonable (hey, one of them sent me a nice email), and after all they did cite the earlier article 8 times. [sent-54, score-0.335]
19 Self-plagiarism isn’t as bad as real plagiarism, and Frey did in fact apologized (and it was a real apology, not a non-apology apology of the form, “I’m sorry there was something I did that led to a perception of wrongdoing” etc). [sent-61, score-0.488]
20 Hence I felt the larger problem was not with these particular people but rather with the lack of general agreement that researchers have a duty to share data and methods where possible. [sent-70, score-0.339]
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