iThenticate Blog

In March of this year the Gawker blog TKTK published a piece by James King entitled, “My Year Ripping Off the Web With the Daily Mail Online”.

It has been a difficult few months for Arizona State University professor Matthew Whitaker.

In July, Whitaker was demoted to an associate professor at ASU following allegations that he had plagiarized passages in his most recent book, Peace Be Still: Modern Black America from World War II to Barack Obama.

These days, when many picture an academic plagiarist, they envision a student gleefully copying and pasting from Wikipedia in hopes of taking a shortcut on their coursework.

When it comes to punishing plagiarists, we hear a great deal about how plagiarism can impact one’s career, result in the retraction of papers or in academic punishments if the accused is a student. In extreme cases, we hear about infringers being accused of copyright infringement and being sued in civil court.

Earlier this month, Elsevier filed a lawsuit in New York against two websites that it accuses of pirating their content. According to the lawsuit, Library Genesis and SciHub, are havens where individuals can access articles and other content published by Elsevier.

In December 2014, an article published in the journal Science claimed that canvassers could changes the minds of conservative voters on same-sex marriage with a brief conversation. The study began to attract a great deal of attention in the mainstream press due to its relevancy to both an ongoing political divide and Supreme Court case.

In April, the U.S. Army published a 55-page manual entitled Cultural and Situational Understanding, which was meant to serve as a guide for servicemen working in environments with cultures different than their own.

In a recent post on Retraction Watch, the Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention published a note by Yong Jiang, a researcher who sought to retract an earlier paper of his due to plagiarism issues.

Vice reporter Brian Merchant wrote a post for Vice’s Motherboard blog entitled “The Girl Who Would Live Forever”, a story about a cancer-stricken girl in Bangkok who was cryogenically frozen in hopes of finding a cure later.