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Plagiarism and Professional Ethics—A Journal Editor's View
Michael Grossberg
| As my contribution to this round table, I want to discuss the problem of stolen words and ideas and our collective responsibility to prevent such thefts. I do so primarily from my perspective as the editor of a history journal because, over the last few years, plagiarism has been my most direct encounter with the ethical problems that now seem to be plaguing our discipline. While it is not clear whether instances of plagiarism are on the rise, it is clear that our concern about it and other forms of ethical misconduct is growing. The high-profile plagiarism cases of Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose have led to greater concern and scrutiny of all our work. And the advent of digital technology, particularly the Internet, has increased our sense of the vulnerability of our scholarship to misappropriation. I want to probe the problem of plagiarism to suggest how this new ethical sensitivity challenges the way we think about the connection between our scholarship and our professional responsibilities. Specifically, I want to argue that we must increase our sense of collective ethical responsibility and our determination to enforce the basic values and beliefs of our scholarly community. |
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The American Historical Review has not escaped the recent epidemic of ethical problems. In two instances book reviewers wrote and told us that the authors of the volumes they were reviewing had borrowed words and ideas from the reviewers' own books. Trying to find a way to address their concerns compelled me to confront plagiarism both as a particular editorial problem and also as a part of the larger ethical crisis confronting our discipline. |
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Perhaps my biggest surprise was realizing how ill equipped I was to deal with the issue. After more than twenty years in the classroom, I had, of course, dealt with numerous instances of student plagiarism. Though it is very important to address such student misdeeds in a rigorous manner, I think that in terms of both motivation and consequences they are a problem qualitatively different from the misappropriation of others' work by fellow professionals. In retrospect, I realize that I brought to the problem of plagiarism by professionals a vague sense of what constituted this type of academic misconduct and a general belief that it was one of the most abhorrent ethical violations a historian can commit. Like the late United States Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart's famous quip about pornography, I thought I would know plagiarism when I saw it, and thus I would also know what to do about it. I was wrong on both counts. |
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My struggles began when I tried to determine the meaning of plagiarism. Obviously, the easiest form of plagiarism to identify and condemn is the direct pilfering of words. And yet we all know that plagiarism extends beyond taking sentences to the misappropriation of ideas. As a guide to the complexity of the subject, I turned to our discipline's most authoritative pronouncement: the "Statement on Plagiarism" by the American Historical Association (AHA). Fittingly, it defines plagiarism broadly to include
more subtle and perhaps more pernicious abuses than simply expropriating the exact wording of another author without attribution. Plagiarism also includes the limited borrowing, without attribution, of another person's distinctive and significant research findings, hypotheses, theories, rhetorical strategies, or interpretations, or an extended borrowing even with attribution.
And the statement warns that, while the most obvious abuse is the direct appropriation of another person's language, "more subtle abuses include the appropriation of concepts, data, or notes all disguised in newly crafted sentences, or reference to a borrowed work in an early note and then extensive further use without attribution. All such tactics reflect an unworthy disregard for the contributions of others."1 |
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