Plagiarism is perhaps the most serious academic misconduct accusation that can be made at an academic. It is an insulation that an academic is lazy, sneaky, or unimaginative in their work. It is not an accusation which should be made lightly, and unlike we have seen in the tragic case of Jason Arday, an accusation which can be fairly or adequately dealt with by idle speculation.
Plagiarism is not one thing. It is a bundle of misconduct, moral assertion, academic consensus, and research norms bundled into institutional policy. It is a simple idea which is interrogated, interpreted, and applied differently in different institutions. Originality is the cornerstone of research and the basis on which academics should, structural inequalities aside, be rewarded, promoted, and get on in academia. Plagiarism is the opposite of originality and at its most base represents stolen valour from others.
It is both an individual and collective problem. If the public loses confidence that research is original, the only basis on which it can be worthwhile, then there is no reason to fund it. It is in these terms that the accusation is so serious that it cannot be left to amateur sleuths with an axe to grind to decide who has plagiarised and who has not..
It should follow that if there is a genuine belief that plagiarism represents a grievous moral infringement then it deserves an equally serious enquiry. Treating plagiarism seriously means evaluating it on its own terms. Believing someone is a poor scholar does not make them a fabulist and believing someone is a fabulist does not make them a poor scholar. As Christina Horvath wrote for Wonkhe
Claims of plagiarism should ultimately be adjudicated through academic procedures, not by newspapers treating detection software as definitive evidence. Tools such as Turnitin can identify textual overlap without determining whether misconduct occurred. Cambridge’s investigation should also establish what was known at the time of appointment and whether inaccuracies in Arday’s CV were identifiable then. If so, the failure is institutional as well as individual.
Definitions
In their Policy on the governance of good research practice UKRI write that “Plagiarism refers to using other people’s ideas, intellectual property or work (written or otherwise) without acknowledgement or permission.” Institutions tend to stretch this definition further to include the failure to cite someone else’s work even if the plagiarism was unintentional. For example, the University of Kent’s plagiarism statement including failing to adequately reference sources
Plagiarism has a pretty clear definition, the passing off of someone else’s work as your own, but it has an inescapable moral element to it where inconsistency begins to creep in. Institutions will often draw a distinction between poor academic practice (unintentional plagiarism) and cheating (intentional plagiarism). There is an implicit moral hierarchy. Outright theft is worse than poor scholarship.
A debate on what plagiarism is should be delicately handled and we should all feel uncomfortable with any attempt to wholescale and bluntly redefine plagiarism. There has been a recent focus on whether “textual overlaps” are the same as outright plagiarism. It is worth keeping in mind that the widespread availability of plagiarism detection tools cover an enormous body of work making some overlaps inevitable. This technology makes deciding what plagiarism is an even greater matter of academic judgement. This also means that the application of plagiarism cannot be so broad as to mean a certain percent of text overlap or the repetition of commonly used phrases.
It also cannot be so narrow as only include the verbatim pilfering of novel insights. On a practical level there would be no academic on the planet who would ever be found to have plagiarised. On a moral level the production of novel ideas emerges through the process of novel thinking. Novel thinking is captured through the tools that we have and in the arts and humanities that is writing papers, monographs, and books. It just isn’t possible to disaggregate where original research begins and ends if the bar is so low as to only capture the most egregious examples of cheating.
Difficulties
Outside of the most obvious theft to the highest levels of originality sits an enormous hinterland of authors borrowing, recycling, remembering, and building on the work of others. Preventing plagiarism helps to place work in the lineage and context of other work and in turn add to the sum-total of human knowledge. The contribution of the part to the whole is the only means to move the machine of progress forward. To take someone else’s idea is to rob it of momentum.
This is also why the debate around plagiarism deserves more care. It is the appropriate forum that awarding bodies investigate the credibility of their award. It is appropriate that institutions, colleagues, and academic peers support, scrutinise, and otherwise investigate academics. It does nothing for academic standards or academia more generally to speculate on the motivations of people whose minds we cannot know or the originality of their work in fields we are unfamiliar with.
