Avoiding plagiarism,
self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical
writing
Acknowledging the source of our
ideas
Just about every scholarly or scientific
paper contains several footnotes or reference notes documenting the source of
the facts, ideas, or evidence that is reported in support of arguments or
hypotheses. In some cases, as in those
papers that review the literature in a specific area of research, the reference
section listing the sources consulted can be quite extensive, sometimes taking
up more than a third of the published article (see, for example, Logan, Walker,
Cole, & Leukefeld, 2000). Most
often, the contributions we rely upon come from the published work or personal
observations of other scientists or scholars.
On occasion, however, we may derive an important insight about a
phenomenon or process that we are studying, through a casual interaction with
an individual not necessarily connected with scholarly or scientific work. Even in such cases, we still have a moral
obligation to credit the source of our ideas.
A good illustrative example of the latter point was reported by Alan
Gilchrist in a 1979 Scientific American article on color perception. In a section of the article, which describes
the perception of rooms uniformly painted in one color, Gilchrist states: “We
now have a promising lead to how the visual system determines the shade of gray
in these rooms, although we do not yet have a complete explanation. (John
Robinson helped me develop this lead.)” (p.122; Gilchrist, 1979). A reader of the scientific literature might
assume that Mr. Robinson is another scientist working in the field of visual
perception, or perhaps an academic colleague or an advanced graduate student of
Gilchrist’s. The fact is that John
Robinson was a local plumber and an acquaintance of Gilchrist in the town where
the author spent his summers. During a
casual discussion, Robinson’s insights into the problem that Gilchrist had been
working on were sufficiently important to the development of his theory of
lightness perception that Gilchrist felt ethically obligated to credit
Robinson’s contribution.
Even the most ethical authors can fall
prey to the inadvertent appropriation of others’ ideas, concepts, or
metaphors. Here we are referring to the
phenomenon of unconscious plagiarism, which, as stated earlier, takes place
when an author generates an idea that s/he believes to be original, but which
in reality had been encountered at an earlier time. Given the free and frequent exchange of ideas in science, it is
not unreasonable to expect instances in which earlier exposure to an idea that
lies dormant in someone’s unconscious, emerges into consciousness at a later
point, but in a context different from the one in which the idea had originally
occurred. Presumably, this is exactly
what happened in the case of former Beatle George Harrison, whose song “My Sweet
Lord” was found to have musical elements of the song “He’s So Fine”, which had
been released years earlier by The Chiffons (see Bright Tunes Music Corp. v. Harrisongs Music, Ltd., 1976). Unfortunately, there are probably other John
Robinsons, as well as other accomplished scientists, scholars, and artists, now
forgotten, whose original, but unacknowledged ideas have been subsequently and
unconsciously “reinvented/rediscovered” by others and have, thus, failed to get
their due credit.
In some cases the appropriation of
an idea can be a subtle process.
Consider the famous case of Albert Schatz who, as a graduate student
working under Selman Waksman at Rutgers, discovered the antibiotic
streptomycin. Even though the first
publications describing his discovery identified Schatz as primary author
(Martin, 1997), it was Wakman who, over a period of time, began to take sole
credit for the discovery ultimately earning him the Nobel prize in 1952 (see,
for example, Shatz, 1993; Mistiaen,
2002
for a fuller description of this case.
Of course, there also have been
instances in which unscrupulous scientists have intentionally appropriated
ideas. The confidential peer review
process is a ripe source from which ideas may be plagiarized. Consider the scenario where the offender is
a journal or conference referee, or a member of a review panel for a funding
agency. He[1]
reads a paper or a grant proposal describing a promising new methodology in an
area of research directly related to his own work. The grant fails to get funded based, in large part, on his
negative evaluation of the protocol. He then goes back to his lab and prepares
a grant proposal using the methodology stolen from the proposal that he
refereed earlier and submits his proposal to a different granting agency. In fact, elements of the above scenario are
based on actual cases of scientific misconduct investigated by ORI.
The peer review context appears to
be sufficiently susceptible to the appropriation of ideas that in 1999 the
federal Office of Science and Technology expanded their definition of
plagiarism as follows:
“Plagiarism is the appropriation of
another person’s ideas, processes,
results, or words without giving
appropriate credit, including those
obtained through confidential
review of others’ research proposals and
manuscripts.” (Office of Science
and Technology Policy, 1999).
Guideline 1: An ethical writer
ALWAYS acknowledges the contributions of others and the
source of his/her ideas.
