I have received an electronic offprint of two publications from/in
Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 51/2009 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010):
- Kent Emery: Caveat lector (pp. 347-349)
- Michael V. Dougherty, Pernille Harsting, and Russell L. Friedman: 40 Cases of Plagiarism
(pp. 350-391; I expect this text to become a classic as the dossier on an extreme case of plagiarism)
From Kent Emery's Caveat lector: Quote:As we see in the deepest circles of Dante’s Inferno, nothing dissolves the trust that anneals any society more than crimes of fraud and deception.
I agree completely. And this aspect is the probably major one which makes me unhappy about the case in question. If we have to check each and any citation/quotation in the work of others which we use (instead of, as I do now, just a random few plus those which I consider to be extremely crucial for my own work), we can either choose to forsake progress (because all of the time we have for research will be spent with checking other people's sources), or to stop using texts written by other contemporary scholars - and I guess neither is a good choice.
Quote:Scholarly standards serve the discovery of truth, which even now, except one be a nihilist, is said to be the goal of scholarly research and philosophic inquiry.
I don't consider myself a nihilist, but I guess I will have to accept that label. IMO the goal of research is research (to me it is an end in itself, just like music), and the goal of philosophical inquiry is thinking and enticing other to think too.
In non-religious contexts IMO "truth" exists only in hindsight and as a
plurale tantum.
Quote:Within the
community of learning, the act of plagiarism violates the authors whose
thought and speech are raped; it betrays editors and publishers, who are an
author’s “personal benefactors,” whose precise duty it is to vouchsafe what
they publish, and who, if they publish plagiarized material, appear negligent;
finally, it violates the faith of readers, who must trust that what they read is
what it claims to be.
Iuxta modum. IMO the original authors are not "raped" their "thought and speech", but they don't get all of the praise and laurels which are due to them.
As for editors and publishers: yes, "if they publish plagiarized material" they will "appear negligent". But: they or the reviewers who worked for them IMO will have
been negligent. Yes, I have (co-)edited some things myself; yes, I confess that I did not check everything in every item which appeared in a volume (co-)edited; yes, I think that there is the possibility of something like "
unavoidable negligence"; yes, I do consider myself guilty of such "unavoidable negligence"; but still IMO even "unavoidable negligence" is negligence.
Concerning the readers: I agree completely.
Quote:That there are those who commit acts of plagiarism
is one thing; that such acts can be repeated successfully, without detection, in
40 articles, over a period of at least 11 years, in the pages of the most “prestigious”
journals and at the most “prestigious” presses, is quite another thing
altogether, which exposes some pathology in the contemporary body academic
that cries out for diagnosis
Yes!
Quote:In the contemporary academic world, it is publication that brings the greatest
rewards, namely the securing of academic positions, promotions, funding
for further research, money, etc. One must remember that for every scholar
who secures a position or wins a grant there are many more who do not, and
many of those might never find employment that allows them to continue
academic research.
Yes.
Quote:Further, a virtue considered especially praiseworthy in
scholarly publications is “originality”; indeed, a fundamental criterion for
evaluating the merit of any publication is whether it can be said to have made
an “original contribution to scholarship”; perhaps nothing more invidious
about a publication can be said—in all of those “blind peer reviews” or secret
tenure and promotion reviews—than that it is “unoriginal” or “depends on the
work of others” or “simply rehashes what others say.” So the “more or less” of
publication and its perceived “originality” have existential consequences that
ripple through the whole scholarly community.
I cannot remember that I ever used the word "original" as a word of unreserved praise for any scholarly text.
"Originality" IMO is often a good thing in the work of an belles lettres author, but rarely to be sought in the work of a shoemaker or a plumber, and a doubtful and twoedged something in scholarly literature.
Emery then has a discussion of reviewing which IMO is very thoughtful and thought provoking but which I won't comment on here.
Quote:The public review of a considerable body of articles in scholarly journals
and volumes of collected essays, prepared according to the principles of “evidence-
based scholarship” by Michael V. Dougherty, Pernille Harsting and
Russell L. Friedman, published below, renders an important service to the
worldwide community of scholars in the Société Internationale pour l’Étude
de la Philosophie Médiévale. The results of the authors’ painstaking research
are disturbing, but who is the Real Philosopher (no ‘mere historian’) who
would counsel one to conceal unpleasant truths, which have significant consequences
for the world of learning?
Yes!
Now on
Michael V. Dougherty, Pernille Harsting, and Russell L. Friedman: 40 Cases of Plagiarism First of all: IMO this is a great piece, a result of a lot of hard labour.
40 (yes: forty!) publications by Martin Stone were examined, and in each of them they have found Stone to be a plagiarist, and they identify work by others which was plagiarised and provide means to check their claims and example citations.
Reading this is the probably most frightening dark ride I have ever been on.
The authors write:
Quote:The Dossier below contains 40 entries, documenting the plagiarism found
in the 40 publications by Martin W.F. Stone that we have investigated. It is
important to emphasize that the list is not exhaustive; it includes only the main
plagiarized sources that we have identified and documented as of 24 March
2010. We would be grateful for all supplements to, and corrections of, our
documentation.
Each entry includes (1) bibliographical information on the publication by
Martin W.F. Stone; (2) bibliographical information on the main source(s) of
the plagiarized text found in Martin W.F. Stone’s publication; (3) the page
numbers on which the plagiarized text is found in Martin W.F. Stone’s publication,
along with the corresponding page numbers on which the text in question
is found in the original source; (4) one or more examples that illustrate
the plagiarism.
And they do deliver!
Quote:In The New Oxford Dictionary of English, “plagiarism” is defined as “the
practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s
own.”1 The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (where Martin W.F. Stone was
employed until recently) states on its homepage: “K.U.Leuven defines plagiarism
as follows: ‘Plagiarism is any identical or lightly-altered use of one’s
own or someone else’s work (ideas, texts, structures, images, plans, etc.)
without adequate reference to the source.’”2
Taking our point of departure in these generally accepted definitions of
plagiarism, in our documentation of the 40 plagiarism cases we have only
included those occurrences of plagiarism in Martin W.F. Stone’s publications
that answer to the most obvious and indisputable criterion, namely the unacknowledged
copying of someone else’s published work and the publishing of
it as one’s own. More specifically still, by ‘unacknowledged copying and publishing’
we mean the copying, verbatim or in a slightly altered form,3 of pas-
sages of text written and published by others, and publishing this copied text
under one’s own name, without indication of the dependence on the source.4
Following this criterion, in our documentation we have not included the examples
in Martin W.F. Stone’s publications of unacknowledged paraphrasing
of others’ published work. Furthermore, we have not registered the examples
of unacknowledged use of standard translations, but only noted some of the
places where Martin W.F. Stone claims authorship of standard translations
and translations published in earlier works by other scholars.
And now I am hoping for an open access version of their dossier, so that there are improved chances that whosoever searches on the internet for "Martin Stone" will also find this text, and can then check and decide whom to quote as the source of a statement made by Stone/"Stone".
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Martin Stone accused of plagiarism (Read 172094 times)
