Page 201 - English for Writing Research Papers

Chapter 11

Plagiarism and Paraphrasing

Factoids
US screenwriter, Wilson Mizner (1876–1933), once said: If you steal from
one author, it's plagiarism, if you steal from many, it's research.
*****
Many famous authors, artists, musicians and politicians (in their speeches)
have been involved in alleged plagiarism, including Dan Brown (author of
The Da Vinci Code ), Alex Hayley (author of Roots ), Andy Warhol (US artist),
Damien Hirst (British artist), John Lennon and George Harrison (The Beatles),
and Led Zeppelin (British rock band).
*****
According to the website of plagiarism-detector software producers, iThenti-
cate, one in three editors regularly encounters plagiarism, and nine in ten edi-
tors say that plagiarism software is effective in revealing cases of plagiarism.
*****
In 2001, thirty-one students at Carleton University (Ottowa, Canada) were
caught submitting essays that they had taken from websites, in one case a
student had only changed four words from the original essay.
*****
A study by Donald McCabe conducted at Rutgers University (Newark, USA)
showed that only 6% of professors report cheating regularly (54% rarely,
40% never). The study highlighted that in an era of political corruption,
drug-taking athletes, and illegal downloading (of movies, music and books),
students are not able to understand that cheating and plagiarism are wrong.
*****
Wikipedia cites around 20 famous cases of plagiarism in academia, a
Rumanian mathematician and computer scientist claims to have published
more than 400 papers, a number of which have been shown to be duplicates
of papers previously published by other researchers.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 185
A. Wallwork, English for Writing Research Papers,
English for Academic Research, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-26094-5_11