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“Universities cracking down on student plagiarism need to pay closer attention to faculty.”

Mississippi State University bioethicist Barton Moffatt predicts doctors who allow their names to be put on ghostwritten articles may one day find themselves being fired over the practice, adding that many in academia now see the practice as plagiarism.

[Trudo] Lemmens [a professor of medical law at the University of Toronto] says he would fail any student who handed in a ghostwritten article, adding that universities cracking down on student plagiarism need to pay closer attention to faculty, as well.

“It is clearly false representation, which is academic misconduct. If we don’t do something about it (ghostwriting), it’s hard to tell the students it is wrong.”

You do begin to wonder… I mean, what are universities afraid of? The medical faculty will poison their sherry? You’ve got all these really highly paid professors, quite a number of whom do a raft of illegal, unethical, embarrassing things… The whole conflict of interest, ghost-writing, Continuing Medical Vacation shebang…

From the same article:

To test the integrity of a [corporate-ghosted] publication called The Open Information Science Journal, Cornell University student Philip Davis and Kent Anderson of the New England Journal of Medicine, submitted a fake manuscript – generated by a computer program to be purposely nonsensical – at the end of January. The “open information” journal offered to publish the article if the pair agreed to pay an $800 publishing fee. The editor later resigned.

Margaret Soltan, June 22, 2009 11:19AM
Posted in: conflict of interest

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2 Responses to ““Universities cracking down on student plagiarism need to pay closer attention to faculty.””

  1. Cassandra Says:

    I am starting to think many universities don’t give a crap about plagiarism, period.

    Students can do it. The deans can do it. The PR department can do it. Why not the med school faculty? And the education faculty… Et cetera…

  2. MikeM Says:

    Reminds me of Alan Sokal’s famous hoax about 10 years back, inspired by (of all things) a book critical of "…a disturbing trend in university liberal arts departments, especially English, to become dominated by a "trendy" branch of postmodernist deconstructionist thought."

    Trendy and fuzzy-thinking liberal arts departments? Shocking. But I’m just the messenger.

    And no, the extra quotation marks aren’t mine, they’re lifted from the story as recounted on Wikipedia:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

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