Bulletin De Philosophie Medievale (2009; 350-391) has published "40 cases of plagiarism" by M.V. Dougherty, P. Harsting and R.L. Friedman. This documents Stone's history of plagiarism. (Friedman was a colleague of Stone at Leuven.) The paper circulates in pdf, but I don't believe I am at liberty to post it here. One can, however, acess Kent Emery's introduction to the volume here: http://brepols.metapress.com/content/g828763pn9g77m37/fulltext.pdf [The introduction also has a useful potted history about analytic history of midieval philosophy from its Cornell origins.]
I quote:
How was it possible, for example, for the scrivener to plagiarize an article by another in a British encyclopedia and then publish his workmanship in a British Companion, both edited by the same person (see Case 11, pp. 364-65)? ...Or how was it possible that the scrivener hugely plagiarized the essay of an eminent Thomist published in a volume bringing together “Thomistic doctrines and modern perspectives,” and then published his workmanship in a volume bringing together “Thomistic and Analytical Traditions,” edited by another eminent Thomist and crammed full of essays by yet other eminent Thomists (see Case 14, pp. 367-68)? One thing is clear: Eminent Thomists do not necessarily read the essays of other eminent Thomists, which, if they had, they might have been able to detect that someone was ripping-off another person’s essay. Do contributors to encyclopedias, Companions and volumes of collected essays treating their own specialized subjects read anything in the volumes besides the page-proofs of their own entries and ‘chapters’?
[Hmm...in general, no.--ES]
...Necessarily, then, it is the named editor or ‘managing editor’ of a journal who must take full responsibility for the quality of its essays, not pawning off that responsibility on anonymi, even if he or she did nothing more than adjudicate secret reviews. When a journal has an ‘editorial board’ that collectively makes decisions, it can be the case that the members end up disputing the merit of the multiple and contrary reviews they receive more than the quality of the essay itself. At that point the issue is usually resolved by majority vote, say, 2-1. But that procedure can easily subvert the fact that the quality of a batch of reviews is no better than the quality of the single best review among them. Moreover, the system of “blind review” cannot prevent, and may exacerbate, the habit of reviewers of inflating the value of essays that are “in-network” and demeaning the value of essays that are “out-of-network.” In the present circumstances, there are no obvious alternatives to the system of “blind review,” but we need not be so naive as to wax rhapsodic about its “scientific rigor."...I suggest that we should restore the scholarly status of the public book review, and extend reviews to volumes of collected essays, which are now such a prominent medium of scholarly discourse, and to thematic special numbers of scholarly journals.
There are themes here -- on how to improve refereeing; the secret priestcraft of experts; the lack of reading in the discipline; the importance of published review; etc -- that I wish to develop in future posts....
51e année 2009
51
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