Academic Shoplifting : Current Events as Parable

Today's "Public Editor" column in the New York Times is about the case of a Times reporter who recently resigned after being accused of plagiarism. The reporter's explanation (he claimed that he "was as surprised as anyone that this was occurring...") involved copying and pasting text from other news sources into a file that also contained his own work and basically losing track of which work was his and which was not. Whether one is skeptical of this explanation or not, it contains an important lesson for academics and scholars: technology makes it all too easy to (accidentally) plagiarize, but technology is not an acceptable excuse for plagiarism.

One technique I use to guard against it is to paste a reference at the end of each paragraph that I type/copy from another work AND any sentence I write that's a paraphrase of another work.  That way, whenever I move text around the reference can ride along with it and I never have to depend on my memory or diligence later (when, usually, a deadline looms).

The Public Editor

Journalistic Shoplifting

By CLARK HOYT

Published: March 7, 2010

Other Recent Pieces on Plagiarism


The Free-Appropriation Writer(February 26, 2010)
Author, 17, Says It's 'Mixing,' Not Plagiarism (February 11, 2010)
Plagiarism: Everybody Into the Pool (January 7, 2007)
Times Business Reporter Accused of Plagiarism Is Said to Resign(February 17, 2010)
Suit Accuses Hartford Courant of Plagiarism(November 20, 2009)
Washington Post Blogger Quits After Plagiarism Accusations(March 25, 2006)
Sportswriter at Massachusetts Paper Is Fired for Plagiarism(February 4, 2005)