iThenticate Blog

Once it’s published, it’s permanent. This statement was made back in 2008 in a Columbia Journalism Review piece titled “Scrubbing Away their Sins” and it still holds true today. Jack Shafer referred to the same thing in his recent Reuters article on the NPR decision to remove Ahmad Shafi’s article from their website after duplicate content was discovered via a plagiarism check by one of their readers.

Plagiarism is described in NPR’s writer policies as the “unforgivable sin” of journalism, but their reaction to an instance of plagiarism from one of their own interns this past week shows that nothing in the media is ever black and white. Ahmad Shafi, an intern who up until a few months ago was serving on the Kabul bureau for NPR as a fixer and translator, copied, pasted, and only slightly modified sixty-eight words from a story written in 2001 by Jason Burke- a clear case of plagiarism.

Plagiarism in journalism is nothing new, but it’s rare that the integrity of a newsroom as large and respected as the Chicago Tribune is questioned. On July 13th, the revered Windy City periodical ended their relationship with Journatic, an outsourced news agency, after discovering that quotes from both the Deerfield Review and Patch.com had been used in Tribune articles in the month of June. In a statement released Friday morning, the Tribune stated that it will now rely on its regular staff and “trusted freelancers” to provide the local news Journatic had been supplying them with.

In 2011, The Scientific World Journal was excluded from the annual Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports for being an accomplice in a ‘citation cartel.’  Phil Davis over at the Scholarly Kitchen first uncovered evidence against the Scientific World Journal for excessive self-citation practices along with two other journals that shared common board members: Cell Transplantation and Medical Science Monitor.

The Nigerian High Court this week set a date to hear plagiarism charges levied against Lamido Sanusi, Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria. The charges are being brought forward by a Nigerian lecturer in the United States, Professor Victor Dike of the School of Engineering and Technology at the National University of Sacramento in California. Dike, the founder of California’s Centre for Social Justice and Human Development, claims that Sanusi plagiarized his material in lectures on two different occasions.

Yet another case of plagiarism surfaced in European politics recently, when Romania’s newly appointed Education and Research Minister Ioan Mang was accused of copying the work of others in several of his academic papers. This latest incident follows closely on the heels of the resignation of Hungarian President Pal Schmidtt, and is barely a year removed from the plagiarism scandal that forced German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg out of office.

In this age of political hostility and partisan sniping, it’s difficult to tell which news you hear is accurate and which is merely one side trying to discredit the other. It’s difficult to find a time in US history when two parties have been so far apart in their ideologies. Ammunition for both parties now regularly includes digging up instances of plagiarism from the past to discredit opposing political candidates.  Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren found out recently that old and irrelevant publications could come back to hurt her.

In a recent case at Arizona State University, Professor Matthew Whitaker appeared to have committed plagiarism, but an ASU investigative committee declared that his actions were “unintentional carelessness” instead of “systematic or substantial plagiarism.” The ruling did not sit well with many members of the academic community, including ASU professor Monica Green, who resigned her position in protest over the decision.

Two years ago, Dr. Ferric C. Fang, editor in chief of Infection and Immunity, discovered that a published author within his journal was guilty of data manipulation.  Infection and Immunity responded by retracting the six papers submitted by Naoki Mori; 24 of Mori’s other papers have since been retracted by other scientific journals.

Allegations of plagiarism have struck a second International Olympic Committee (IOC) member, South Korean taekwondo gold medal winner Moon Dae-sung, according to South Korean news agency reports.