Yesterday I reported a possible case of plagiarism of a story that involved my botfly affliction of many years ago. I’ve reported this case to Princeton University Press and the Nautilus site, which published or will publish the passage in question, as well as to Scribner’s (now part of Simon and Schuster) and to RadioLab, purveyors of the words that may have been plagiarized. I will report their responses unless I’m forbidden to do so. I have not contacted the author or his employers, and will not do so.
I emailed Nautilus (they don’t have a phone number on the Web), and they must have immediately contacted the author, who added 23 footnotes to the piece yesterday as well as a “correction”. Here is the correction and the first 8 footnotes; apparently I did email the guy six years ago, though I don’t remember that.
But the use of many quotations in the initial article, as well as the book (from which the article was taken), and the attendant implication that those quotations were given by me to the author Robert Levine, was misleading. And that’s not all, for the striking similarity of wording between Levine’s piece and a passage in the 1984 book Tropical Nature remains unfootnoted, and continues to constitute what I think is plagiarism:
This is Levine’s passage, which is NOT footnoted though it contains direct wording from Tropical Nature:
This was the same museum that was founded by the great Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz, under the guiding philosophy to “study nature, not books.” But, aside from fruit flies in a sterile lab, the only nature Coyne was seeing were stuffed mammals in a display case on his way to the Pepsi machine. When given the opportunity to take a summer field course in tropical ecology in Costa Rica, Coyne didn’t hesitate. He never imagined how close to nature he would get.
Two last comments: I put a comment on the Nautilus site as well as having emailed them, and they neither published my comment nor had the common decency to respond to my email. I wash my hands of them.
Finally, I am not doing this because I think I was plagiarized. I am doing this for three reasons: because RadioLab and Robert Krulwich may have been plagiarized, and I am quite fond of that show (and my botfly episode); because the work of my friends Ken Miyata and Adrian Forsyth may also have been plagiarized, and Ken died some time ago; and finally, because I absolutely despise those who pass off the words of others as their own. That seems to have happened in this case. The footnoting has not completely resolved this issue, nor am I sure that that footnoting appears in Levine’s upcoming book. That book, due out May 10, has already been published and copies are on their way to the sellers.
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Hehe. Next time I’ll make it a question
Working in a library as I do, I take plagiarism & copyright very seriously. Recently a colleague was telling me about his girlfriend’s phd research. We searched the web (OK, ‘googled’) for her work & were amazed to discover a fellow academic, who had presented a short paper at a conference just before or after my colleague’s girfriend, appeared to have taken the work the latter presented in whole chunks, & published it with no acknowledgements at all in an online journal. I imagine as a Phd student you feel powerless against an established academic, but her supervisor is supporting her & has taken it in hand. We await developmeents. But it is shameless. I write a regular Friday b*og or website item for our library, usually on something historical based on what we have in our collection. I am always careful to acknowledge sources & I hate it when people do not do that. Newspapers have always done this – it is called ‘patch writing’ – e.g.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=patch%20writing
or
“Plagiarism in the Internet Age.” By Rebecca Moore Howard and Laura J. Davies. Educational Leadership (March 2009): 64-67
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar09/vol66/num06/Plagiarism-in-the-Internet-Age.aspx
I spent a good part of my working life at several newspapers, and patch writing would never have been tolerated, nor particularly useful when reporting news events firsthand. We did have copy desks back then, though, so maybe it’s more prevalent now, but of course all “news” outlets are now lumped together as “the media”, regardless of integrity.
I now teach in a journalism program, and the accusation that plagiarism is only briefly mentioned on the first class day is also untrue. We have entire courses in media law and ethics. Perhaps it is in the STEM programs that ethics is not sufficiently covered?
A point about the Internet: It might facilitate plagiarism, but it also makes it a lot easier to uncover. As this case illustrates, it’s harder to get away with now.
Since you teach in a journalism program, just congenially curious – do you consistently read, as an example, The NY Times and by chance note certain reportorial tropes (in my view reportorial conceits) not a few of their reporters employ in supposedly objectively reporting news? (Reviews by critics in the arts and op-eds of course excepted.)
E.g., a reporter occasionally states that someone (high gov’t official, business demigod) is “signaling” a certain future course of action, but the reporter doesn’t reveal the mystery of how s/he possibly knows that. I’d prefer to hear a quote from that someone clearly stating what s/he is going to do.
A reporter describes someone as “unlikely” to have accomplished a certain success or task or goal. Or may address the reader to the effect that the reader “may be surprised” at this success. Again, how does a reporter possibly know that as a fact, or presume to know what a given reader may find surprising? To me it “seems” a certain reportorial bias.
There are numerous NYT stories where the reporter presumes to tell the reader how something “seems” to the reporter. Is how something “seems” to a reporter a legitimate, objectively reportable news item? Noted. Why not rather ask someone for a quote revealing how something actually “is” rather than fatuously speculating about how it “seems”? In a strong field of candidates, this “seems” most egregiously evident in the Times’ reporting of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, with rampant speculation on how the Court will vote on a case, as if that speculation were somehow no less objective reporting than that of the actual decision some weeks/months later.
Finally, recently the Times has held forth on the Leicester, England soccer team, the reporter specifically referring to Leicester as “unglamorous,” making sure to also refer to the team’s fan base as predominantly “working class.” I gather that the reporter is an expert on all things “glamorous.” (Do reporters belong to “the working class”?)Perhaps he’d like to also hold forth on the “non-working class”? (That is, the “investor class,” unaccustomed to handling a shovel or lawn mower, or washing their own socks and drawers, or cleaning their own toilets, or taking out the trash, even on an extremely modest once-a-year basis as an exercise in humility, much as the foot-washing Primitive Baptists of the U.S. Appalachian South.)
What are schools of journalism/colleges of communications generally teaching students about this sort of thing?
you would think some pre-publication proof-reading would have flagged indiscretions with quoting people. I think we all know what happens when authors invent quotes. The pressure to publish must have been too great.
Frankly, I would read this “Tropical Nature” before anything else – I never knew PCC(E) was being manipulated by aliens this whole time! Checkmate atheists.
Yes! And curiously appropriately last night the BBC repeated a programme which had bot flies being extracted from various bits of anatomy…!
That costs. And that will be the end of the discussion, until the lawyer’s bills arrive.
Well, one positive outcome of this plagerism episode is that it made me aware of the book Tropical Nature, which I have now ordered.
That book was very inspiring for me when I was changing careers from physicist to biologist.
(if you can call “physics graduate student” a career…)
I’m always amazed by you polymaths!
Plagerism and inclusion of names in papers of those who have not any work at all. During my short stint in Research n Physics, I had done the ideas and work but the paper first names were the departments heads and one name was included name of person from another country who had no clue about the work. This way the heads got invited as guest teachers, enjoying privileged teaching holidays. Because I was a Ph,D student I kept quiet.
It’s disappointing that there was no response from Nautilus. I like that site.
I’ve no idea where Nautilus’s HQ is, but many places have just had their May Day bank holiday (or equivalent), so a defence of “the office was empty” might hold water.
We’ll see, as I wrote them again today. Their headquarters are in New York City.
NYC sure as hell didn’t have a bank holiday yesterday. This is America, we don’t believe in Holidays unless they’re for good reasons like celebrating our history of military dominance or for religious holidays whose observances are taken whole cloth from ancient Pagan festivals. But a holiday for the sake of unwinding??? That’s socialism!
Good work, Jerry.
You know. it’s almost hopeless in this era of cut and paste which extends from high school to ultimate profession. I, quite by accident, discovered that much of a university senior’s paper had been largely plagiarized. I documented every line and matched it with the original, took it to the dean of the graduate school and the dean of social sciences. Nothing was done , and I was told that I had “done a good job of documenting” the plagiarism. The individual shortly thereafter graduated with a thesis which was incredible (in the sense that it had no credibility), and not long ago I found his name in a list of consultants.
Apparently in some places plagiarism is the new norm and nothing to get too upset about. With paper retractions at a new high and papers with as many as 100 co-authors one can say thanks for Google and similar sites, but there should be some significant penalties – perhaps humiliation is not enough for plagiarists. My wife and I both know that referees cannot be counted on do reliable jobs. If they don’t have the time – they should not take the responsibility.