DCP's ongoing problem with plagiarism

[Guest]

Happy Star Wars day to all, and a very happy copy+pasta day to DCP.

Clever word replacement doesn't change the fact that it's plagiarism. Simple solution: cite sources and stop claiming credit for other's words and phrases.

Notice the insertion of "-- meaning, of course, that it too always falls on a Sunday --"

Evidently added to interrupt the plagiarized text, but in an awkward and confusing way. 50 days after an Sunday would, of course, always fall on a Monday.

Plagiarizing problems 101... if you can't be bothered to think long enough to re-phrase something in your own words, you're liable make mistakes.

Students can get expelled for repeating such behavior.



May the force be with you.

[Guest]

Here is another contribution to the DCP plagiarism watchdog thread.

For this example, I draw on Daniel's 2016 paper, published by the Interpreter.

https://journal.interpreterfoundation.o ... lous-work/
"Many Witnesses to a Marvelous Work"
by Daniel C. Peterson
June 10, 2016

This article was published as a book review.

It is not a blog post. It is not "notes." It is a regular entry to the weekly stream of published articles by the Interpreter.

Below, I show side-by-side, that the book review comprises:

• Six instances of extensive plagiarizing previously published material
• Five of which are previously published Deseret News articles, some copied in whole, others with whole sections cut and inserted
• One of which is copy+pasted text from the book under review, lacking proper quotation marks
• 10 original paragraphs, out of 63 total paragraphs (84% plagiarized content)
• Interestingly, other Deseret News articles published by DCP *ARE* cited in the article, for additional clarification on certain points. But the 5 articles from which he plagiarized an overwhelming majority of this book review, those receive no citation or reference whatsoever.
• Of the 10 original paragraphs in this article, 5 offer bland, generic gospel messages (such as, "But what of the content of those plates? What about the substance of the Book of Mormon itself?"), and the other 5 provide a cursory mention the name and author of the contributions to the book being reviewed, some receiving not even a word of review. Eg, "The Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon opens with a chapter (“The Coming Forth of Plain and Precious Truths”) by Elder Merrill J. Bateman, emeritus member of the Seventy, former presiding bishop of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and former president of Brigham Young University."

In other words, the whole article is a form letter, a phone-in, a sham masquerading as new scholarship.

There is hardly one word of "new" thought in the entire 4,287 words. And somehow, it got past peer review and made it out to press in time to save the Interpreter's unbroken streak of weekly publications. At what price, Daniel?

At a very minimum, Interpreter should print an apology for the gross error in source checking, and provide full citations for the plagiarized text. Realizing this would mean 84% of the article is contained in quotes, it might be better to simply retract the article entirely. Being that it's an online-first journal, with some limited print distribution, an apology and retraction in either case is in order.

https://interpreterfoundation.org/submissions/

Citation Sources: All of the articles we publish are thoroughly source-checked.

EDIT: DN source links, on request.
https://www.deseret.com/2015/12/3/20578 ... -Mormonism
https://www.deseret.com/2015/12/31/2057 ... -of-Mormon
https://www.deseret.com/2010/3/18/20375 ... -of-Mormon
https://www.deseret.com/2015/6/25/20567 ... -of-Mormon
https://www.deseret.com/2016/2/11/20582 ... y-expected
https://rsc.BYU.edu/coming-forth-book-m ... ry-america

[_Dr Moore]

Regarding the article immediately above, the one 84% plagiarized from prior content, Daniel wrote on June 10, 2016 -- the day the article above was published -- at SeN:

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... -work.html

Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture published not merely one new article today, but two. (Or, depending upon how you evaluate the second article, at least one and a half. Or maybe one and a quarter. Or perhaps 1.1 articles is as far as you’re willing to go. Anyway, more than one.)

Here’s the second article:

Many Witnesses to a Marvelous Work

Interpreter was founded approximately 204.5 weeks ago. We have now published at least one new article every Friday for 203 weeks in a row.

I think that the predictions of our imminent death aren’t coming quite as frequently as they once did.

(bold mine)

Clearly, Peterson was uncomfortable with his half-assed effort, and it brings a wry cringe to see that he, himself, ascribes as low as 0.1x value of a full article's to his portion of the 2 Interpreter articles posted that day.

But, the challenge -- "far as you're willing to go" -- was taken up and I conclude that 0.1x might be just about right. Heck, only 16%, or 0.16x, of the paragraphs are not (yet) shown to be plagiarized, but half of those paragraphs were pathetic fluff material at best, consisting of an afterthought effort to list authors and article titles for the book under "review", proving to the reader (or to himself?) that he at least took the time to read the table of contents before hitting "submit."

[_Dr Exiled]

I'm beginning to wonder if there are problems with Coach's academic work as well. Has anyone checked it? I wouldn't be surprised if something was found. The evidence above is pretty damning concerning his work on his blog, interpreter, and his deseret news articles.

[_Lemmie]

Kiwi57 DanielPeterson • 4 days ago

It's not original to me...
Perhaps the obsessive loonies could start rabbitting on about me being a plagiarist too. Why should you get all the glory?

http://disq.us/p/292ao6z

This is too funny. It deserves to be preserved in this thread.

[_Dr LOD]

I'm beginning to wonder if there are problems with Coach's academic work as well. Has anyone checked it? I wouldn't be surprised if something was found. The evidence above is pretty damning concerning his work on his blog, interpreter, and his deseret news articles.

There definitely seems to be a pattern here. I'm not too concerned with what he posts on his blog. The more concerning part are the examples posted in this thread of the "published" works.

[_Lemmie]

I'm beginning to wonder if there are problems with Coach's academic work as well. Has anyone checked it? I wouldn't be surprised if something was found. The evidence above is pretty damning concerning his work on his blog, interpreter, and his deseret news articles.

There definitely seems to be a pattern here. I'm not too concerned with what he posts on his blog. The more concerning part are the examples posted in this thread of the "published" works.

The people who own the intellectual property that Peterson posts on his blog would disagree.

As an example, from an earlier post which documented plagiarism of a Sci Am article in a blog entry by Peterson, note that Scientific American considers “posting on a website/blog” to be a category requiring not only payment for use+of copyrighted material, but also a limitation to use on a blog, after payment, of no more than 20%:

Note that Scientific American allows use of their materials for a fee:

Tiny Worms Survive Forces 400,000 Times Stronger Than Gravity on Earth
Author: Katherine Kornei
Publication: Scientific American
Publisher: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, a Division of Springer Nature America, Inc.
Date: Aug 1, 2018
Copyright © 2018, Scientific American, Inc.

Welcome to RightsLink

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, a Division of Springer Nature America, Inc. has partnered with Copyright Clearance Center's RightsLink service to offer a variety of options for reusing this content.

https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet#formTop

If you select

I would like to .... post on a website/blog

Then a warning pops up:

Scientific American content shall not make up more than 20% of your new work.

Peterson posted 8 sentences, 6 and 1/2 of which are outright plagiarism, which in my estimation means Sci Am content has made up more than 80% of Peterson’s “new” work, with not a single quotation mark in sight.

[_Dr Moore]

...

[_Dr Moore]

Hot off the presses, Friday May 8, 2020, is yet another instance of that lazy shortcut around forming ideas using one's own words, opting instead to copy and paste the words of others, without attribution. Also known as plagiarism.

Love how the Wikipedia sources are also copied in, giving the appearance of proper attribution of the ideas, but failing to properly quote or attribute the borrowed words and phrases to the obvious source, Wikipedia.

Funny how the root sources -- where direct quotes from the Talmud ARE provided -- are all taken precisely from the Wikipedia source list.

Original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torah_study
Copied by Peterson: https://journal.interpreterfoundation.o ... salvation/



Golly, I wonder if BYU administrators are giving out free passes to students caught plagiarizing Wikipedia too? If not, all a student need do is point the honor code office to this thread and ask for consistency in applying the standard.

[_Dr LOD]

The people who own the intellectual property that Peterson posts on his blog would disagree.

As an example, from an earlier post which documented plagiarism of a Sci Am article in a blog entry by Peterson, note that Scientific American considers “posting on a website/blog” to be a category requiring not only payment for use+of copyrighted material, but also a limitation to use on a blog, after payment, of no more than 20%:

You are correct. I think in his position as a tenured professor the worst example of his plagiarism is, what has been published in academic journals. Although I cringe at the thought of giving the Interpreter that level of respect with that statement.

Because behavior like has not put in check I wonder about the intellectual integrity of those who are in supervisory positions of the Professor.