… and trying to worm your way out, once you’ve been accused, can also be ugly.

For an article about the rise of fascist movements, the Polish news magazine Przekrój used a cover image of Hitler’s face with a barcode instead of a mustache.

Very clever. Also very already done.

The cover artist argues it’s all a remarkable coincidence:

[T]wo artists arrived at the same conceptual solution independently … [T]he similarity is more a comment on the fact that we think and solve visual problems alike than anything more.

Unfortunately, the similarity lies in far more than the use of the mustache as a barcode.

UD‘s friend Maurice sends her the most delicious article retraction statement she’s ever encountered. It’s via the site Retraction Watch, and it appeared in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology:

Volume 48, no. 11, p. 4200–4206, 2010. We hereby retract this article. After publication of the article, we realized that we had failed to cite the article “Epidemiology of candidemia in Brazil: a nationwide sentinel surveillance of candidemiain eleven medical centers” by A. L. Colombo, M. Nucci, B. J.Park, S. A. Nouér, B. Arthington-Skaggs, D. A. da Matta, D. Warnock, and J. Morgan for the Brazilian Network Candidemia Study (J. Clin. Microbiol. 44:2816–2823, 2006). This article should have been cited as reference 9 in the References section instead of the article by A. L. Colombo, M. Nucci, R. Salomão, M. L. Branchini, R. Richtmann, A. Derossi, and S. B. Wey (Diagn. Microbiol. Infect. Dis. 34:281–286, 1999). Moreover, we realized after our article had been published that major parts of the text had been plagiarized almost verbatim from Colombo et al. (J. Clin. Microbiol. 44:2816–2823, 2006). Prof. Cisterna and Dr. Ezpeleta express their deep and sincere apologies to Prof. Colombo and his Brazilian Network Candidemia Study team, to the clinical microbiology community, and to Journal of Clinical Microbiology readers for this embarrassing situation. In addition, we state that Jesus Guinea, Julio García-Rodríguez, Juliana Esperalba, and Benito Regueiro should not have appeared in the author byline, as they contributed to the paper only by supplying isolates and clinical data for the patients and were not involved in the writing of the paper.

Retraction Watch muses on the ethics of guest authorship:

[T]he question of whose name appears on a manuscript is clearly political and jealously guarded. Perhaps that’s as it should be. But does the person who collects the data really deserve less credit than the lab head who was on sabbatical while the vast majority of the work was being conducted, or the section chief who likes to stick fingers in every pie simply to accumulate numbers on a CV?

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UD thanks Maurice.

I’m just reading through this now.

Details in a few moments.

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The story hasn’t hit the English language yet, so the following quotations are my translation from various French sources. Joseph Macé-Scaron, an important member of the French literary community, recently published a novel, a satire about the world of contemporary journalism in Paris, Ticket d’entrée (Ticket). It has just received a high-profile award.

A few days ago, a woman named Evelyne Larousserie happened to read the French novel just after having read the Bryson, and the copying “immediately jumped out at me.”

The author prefers the term intertexuality. Who wouldn’t?

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An attempt at a defense.

… says UD (in an echo of Tolstoy’s famous “happy families” remark). UD has studied plagiarists for many years on this blog, and they are astonishingly similar to one another.

Bahman Bakhtiari, a University of Utah political scientist who has just lost his job, is true to the form.

First, he is a serial plagiarist. UD cannot think of any instance of professorial or artistic plagiarism about which she’s written on this blog where the plagiarist did not turn out to have plagiarized quite a lot before his or her latest plagiarism.

Second, he plagiarizes promiscuously. Anything – a scholarly article, a grant proposal, an opinion piece, a syllabus – can be an occasion for plagiarizing.

And third, he blames his troubles on other people. Graduate students, laboratory subordinates, and editorial assistants are the plagiarist’s traditional fall guys, but anyone will serve, and Bakhtiari offers a broad array of enemies who sought to undo him.

A state Board of Education member resigned last week amid a Purdue University investigation into whether she plagiarized parts of her doctoral dissertation… [P]ortions of the doctoral dissertation turned in by [Gwendolyn Griffith] Adell to Purdue in 2004 are nearly identical to information in a 1999 dissertation submitted by a doctoral candidate at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va.

Now if they can remove her influence from the charter school she’s got hold of…

Not if you’re a student. If you’re a professor.

Young, naive Panos Ipeirotis, a business school instructor, discovered that a bunch of his undergraduate business majors
(background on that burnished major here and here) had plagiarized, and he called them on it.

After announcing his intention to report the cheating to the dean unless students turned themselves in, Ipeirotis said, class became contentious and awkward, and his teaching evaluations suffered. His typical evaluation in this class, 6.0 to 6.5 out of 7.0, fell to 5.3. In his blog post, Ipeirotis wrote that Associate Dean Susan Greenbaum and the department chair “‘expressed their appreciation’ for…chasing such cases.” But his “yearly salary increase was the lowest ever, and significantly lower than inflation, as my ‘teaching evaluations took a hit this year,'” he wrote.

Lesson learned:

“I doubt that I will be checking again for cheaters,” he wrote.

… might be a good name for doctorates from Bonn University. Judging by one high-profile PhD of theirs, the degree is a bit on the confectionery side.

Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a rising German politician, has had the doctorate revoked — more than half of it was plagiarized, which is rather a lot.

Copy, Shake, and Paste, a blog devoted to plagiarism, notes that Chatzimarkakis went on tv, before the revocation, to defend himself:

Chatzimarkakis defended himself with, among other things, the argument that the work was “intertextual” and that he was using “Oxford style” quotations, that he learned when he was at Oxford.

It’s intertextual, man. The self is an illusion. Chill.

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As always, UD thanks Chris for alerting her to the latest naughty German.

Recipe, Article à l’indienne:

Caroline Wallis is only fourteen years old, but she’s already figured out that, above all else, plagiarism is an act of profound contempt for your audience.

She goes to a middle school for promising writers in Manhattan, and her principal gave her class a graduation speech mainly written by David Foster Wallace.

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UD thanks David for the link.

The ex-head of the University of Alberta med school started the fad: When caught plagiarizing, say you did it because you were trying to inspire people.

Now the plagiarizing Wolcott Connecticut superintendent of schools has jumped on the inspirational bandwagon. Like the Alberta guy, he plagiarized a speech he gave to graduating students, sending them off to the future with soaring stolen words. “All I was trying to do was inspire,” he explained.

We live in a truthy, hoaxy, culture – we all know that. Things are seldom what they seem. Things are helpfully cleaned up for us – made nice and simple and just what we want – without our having to notice a thing. It’s twenty-first century efficiency.

So who’s surprised that a busy high-profile journalist seems to interview people, but actually inserts things they’ve already written into his copy and passes them off as statements made during the interview? He even sets the scene for the citation, gives it dramatic urgency: “After saying this, he falls silent, and we stare at each other for a while. Then he says, in a quieter voice…”

Then he says, a quieter voice, “Page 25, footnote 2, My Memoirs…”

The technique has worked well for Hari. He’s very successful. It’s like that old joke with which this essay begins. I guess Hari knows how to tell them.

And the most entertaining form of plagiarism is plagiarism committed by men of the cloth.

Here’s an especially good example.

Tennessee Temple University’s president stole an entire chapter of his book, Jesus is Awesome, from another preacher because, as the guy he plagiarized explains:

“He told me that he had read my book in college, liked it, and was under the impression that I had passed away or that it was no longer in print when he used it.”

Hell, I thought you was dead.

Plus no way that chapter’d be in print anymore – nobody’d recognize it ‘cept you and, hyuk, you’re dead…

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PLUS, as the plagiarist himself explains:

“I didn’t know copyright laws at the time.”

Dean Baker has resigned.

Students were, at first, impressed by the inspirational speech about a doctor’s never ending quest for knowledge. But some knew something was amiss when Dr. Baker referenced the “velluvial matrix,” a term the original author invented and included in his convocation address to students at Stanford University in California last year.

Background here.

The latest Teutonic text-trafficker understands that the best defense is a good offense.

Silvana Koch-Mehrin, forced out of high-profile political jobs by the discovery that she plagiarized her Heidelberg University dissertation, has blamed the university. “The dissertation commission granted me the title in 2000 being fully aware of the considerable weaknesses of my work,” she complained.

Heidelberg is at fault in the matter, in other words, because it enabled Koch-Mehrin’s unfortunate tendency to produce crap. Her hands were tied.

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(UD thanks Chris.)

… low.

Way, way, low.

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(Further thoughts from Philip N. Baker, dean of medicine, University of Alberta.)

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UD thanks Ian.

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Update: Alberta lets its hair hang even lower:

Students have now been asked to not comment publicly as the school tries to limit the fallout of what was supposed to be a celebration.

Uh, let me say a couple of things about this growing-by-the-second story:

1. It’s totally scandalous that a cynical medical school dean would palm off someone else’s words on his students. The contempt it expresses for the students is immense.

2. The behavior totally plays into the already ethically-challenged realm of academic writing in medicine, with its guest authors and ghost authors and all the rest. Great message to send to your graduates – Go out there and download other people’s work.

3. Not comment publicly? Exsqueeze me? I mean, they’ve graduated anyway – they can do what they like, having been sent out into the world by Dean Download. And even if they were still students — What sort of university tries to keep its students from speaking?

4. Answer: An embarrassed university. Fine, yes, it’s embarrassing. The response is not to hush it up but to admit that it happened, that you’re embarrassed, and that you’re looking into sanctions. At the very least it seems obvious to UD that a person who can’t write and deliver a short graduation address should not be a dean. Let’s not even talk about the moral sleaze here.

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Calls for his resignation have begun. This seems to me a very good idea.

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All together now:

One attendee said his brother located the speech on The New Yorker website and was following along on his iPhone as Baker was reciting it.

Talk about the gotcha media! Plagiarist Alert: Soon your audience will be reciting your speech along with you in real time, reading it off their phones.