What is plagiarism?
The act of plagiarism is defined as “taking someone’s words or ideas as if they were your own”.
In the research community, more often than not, we find papers that cite themselves, authors who copy extracts from their own previous papers, etc. Some of you may call that reasonable plagiarism; and I can’t agree more. Usually, everybody does that. I think I very clearly remember doing that myself, though I might have removed it in later versions. Even better case is while writing a thesis: you do copy sections of your papers straight into your thesis, how much ever your advisor might have warned you against it. Your paper, your thesis, it is probably alright.
When an individual writes a thesis there are a lot of interesting problems, but most irritating of them all seem to be that writing is a lot of hard work. Okay, that is what I heard. But my view is that though it was a lot of hard work (to write my thesis), it was the most satisfying path and one that led to a better understanding of my own work.
I have collaborated with a lot of people in the past on common interests; some that lead to successful papers, some research reports and some that lead to friendships beyond academic life.
When collaborating with people following are the two things I always considered:
1. What is your contribution and what is theirs? This is more important if both (or all) of you are working towards your individual thesis.
2. The line between plagiarism and keeping context of a work is a very thin line. Keeping the thin line visible is as important as making sure that it doesn’t look like a thick line (implying your own work). When ‘n’ collaborators work on similar problems it is equally important to ensure that there isn’t a worrying overlap in content (either methodology or prose) of the theses.
I have tried to come up with a story that explains a case that could come up in anybody's life. An undergrad, say John, collaborated with a certain Peter, who graduated with a degree relatively recently. Peter had ideas that he didn’t have time for during his thesis, and John was looking for an interesting research problem where he could focus his energies towards his thesis. They agreed upon a lot of things and disagreed at some of them; but rather importantly, they got along well to do some fine work that was appreciated by many. Now Peter was the expert in the area they worked together, John used some ideas from his side to be applied in the problem setting that Peter gave.
The work went on well and they did great work; published papers and people talked about them at conferences (even for the wrong reasons at times!), such stuff, you know! But then when it came to writing thesis John did the unthinkable -- just blindly copied (extracted) sections/paragraphs from Peter’s thesis. Though most of the cut-copy-paste happened from Introduction and Related Work sections, I think this qualifies for being called plagiarism, certainly Peter believed so. Unfortunately, Peter didn’t have any knowledge about the content of John’s thesis, and in rather unbelievable circumstances, the thesis went through the thesis review process, and say John defends the thesis. Okay, not so unbelievable as I might sound. Obviously, you aren’t expecting John’s advisor to know the entire area and least of all ‘reading all theses in this area’. Now the same thing applies to the review committee; I’d assume if they pass the thesis for defense it isn’t their mistake since they may not even know the area. Their context of the area is only as limited as the research problem addressed in the thesis at hand and they are just doing their best to justify the contextual correctness of the thesis. If the owner of the thesis fails to know what to write and what not, we can’t expect the reviewers to straighten it either.
Obviously, from the story just described it is reasonable to say that Peter could be pissed at John. Matters became only worse when John said “I didn’t know this was not the right way to do it. I really didn’t know that people take thesis so seriously. Most of all, I didn’t know that our theses are put up on university website, and are publicly accessible”. Whether or not there is a public access to the thesis, whether or not somebody complains about a thesis, it is common knowledge that a copyright can’t be violated, and its infringement can be huge trouble. Today’s 10th grader would know that, and giving such a stupid explanation to Peter didn’t help John anyway.
Off the story. Now let us see why you shouldn’t copy from someone else’s work:
1. Among those who know you, your work and the work you copied from: you are already being considered stupid!
2. You have plans for long term research career in academia or industry? Well, remember that by plagiarizing you are just one step away from getting caught.
a. Industry might be tolerant, but you should know that Academia is a bitch when it comes to these things. Somebody finds out about it and that is it. You are over within the circle.
b. Even worse: Five-ten years from now in the midst of your, say flowery, career someone finds this abyss and guess what; there’s no better insult!
3. Ever wondered how many people are working on plagiarism detection worldwide? Only a bunch of them, but imagine what would happen if they discover that from the entire web your thesis is a good sample to present as a case study for their work.
4. What does it mean to Peter:
a. Well, if he is someone looking up to the academic ladder himself, all the similar academic difficulties could arise for him too. Only, he has no reason to get punished. Alas, it appears there is a reason: working with John in first place.
b. Academia or Industry, wherever the case may be, when this information goes out nobody will believe that Peter had no role in the plagiarism. It is natural to believe “Well they wrote papers together, and shared their theses too!”. This means Peter was also involved in plagiarism, and his career is screwed.
There could be ‘n’ such cases we might be able to study, only if we want to, but none of which is ever complete and we are still only talking about the case of two friends who worked together. It is funny to know in how many ways you could be violated, and without your knowledge. Sometimes, after knowing that such things can happen, it becomes harder to work with anybody inexperienced as a fear creeps in, that overtakes the sheer pleasure of working together on exciting problems. But the message of this story is not that; by maintaining a good decorum on how the thesis will be written and reviewed among the two parties it is trivially easy to achieve moral justice to all the Peters and an intellectual satisfaction to all the Johns.
Nobody suffers!
Moral of the story: see the comments; somebody might have something to say? No?
PS: See the number of labels I have for this post. Clearly shows I need to blog more frequently!
