A colleague of mine asked if I might do a post on plagiarism. For the record, I do requests (try the veal and be sure to tip your waitress; or is it the other way around?) I will resist the temptation to stampede off into rhetorical excesses about “special circles of hell,” but I am offended by plagiarism to the core of my being. Plagiarism is the cardinal sin of scholarship only to the extent that cardinal sins are warm and fuzzy things that you laugh about at a party. OK, some rhetorical excess …

Plagiarism is nominally the stealing of words and concepts, and then presenting these as your own original work at the time of presentation. This definition is not the one you’ll necessarily find in the dictionary, because those definitions tend to emphasize the stealing of other people’s words, while I mean to insist that there is also such a thing as self plagiarism. (Also, dictionary definitions and Wikipedia entries do not answer questions so much as they provide a useful heuristic for asking better questions.) Most persons who deal with and condemn plagiarism do so as a charge against the plagiarizers for not doing the work they claim to have done. I will go much further than this charge, however, and argue that the plagiarizer has not simply stolen materials, but has positively wounded the person stolen from. Continue reading →