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Monday, October 03, 2005

CONCEPTUAL PLAGIARISM?

From the student newspaper
at the University of Pennsylvania:



A Penn Sociology professor has accused one of his colleagues of committing "conceptual plagiarism" in a scandal that has enveloped the department and generated buzz at universities across the country.

In an e-mail memo obtained by The Daily Pennsylvanian, professor emeritus Harold Bershady accused Sociology professor Kathryn Edin of stealing the "analytic scheme" of her new book from Elijah Anderson, another Penn faculty member in the same department.

Bershady said that Edin's book -- Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, which she co-authored with St. Joseph's University sociology Maria Kefalas -- took many of its concepts from several works by Anderson. The problem, Bershady said in the memo, was that they gave him very little credit.

"I do not believe Edin and Kefalas have plagiarized Anderson's work in the literal sense of lifting sentences," Bershady wrote. "They have done something more subtle and more grievous. ... They have in effect committed a kind of conceptual plagiarism, taken Anderson's ideas and concepts and represented them as being their own."



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Don’t know quite what to say about this. The idea of conceptual plagiarism is a bit woolly. There are problems of definition and discovery aplenty here. But given what bad shape sociology’s in as a discipline, this story could morph into a larger drama about the future of the field.



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UPDATE: Things seem to have been resolved. Long ago. Very odd.