My training in medieval history had acquainted me with the practice of identifying dependencies among manuscripts by tracing the repetition of errors. By analogy, I thought, if there were additional idiosyncratic errors on my Web site that also appeared in the book, each instance would be a discrete piece of evidence showing that the volume had lifted material from my work.
I found myself in the unusual position of hoping that I had made more mistakes. Could I find more evidence than just two bizarrely placed asterisks?
More like this
Penn State has released the preliminary conclusions of its inquiry into the purloined e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute's attack on Linux gets taken apart in Lee Gomes' Wall Street Journal article:
Remember "ClimateGate", that well-publicized storm of controversy that erupted when numerous email messages from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen b
In my earlier post about the findings of the Penn State inquiry committee looking into allegations of research misconduct against Michael Mann, I mentioned that the one allegation that was found to m
Fascinating. A couple years ago I compiled a list of snakes of a country for a Wikipedia article. I later found the list reproduced on that country's biodiversity management agency's website. Since I had based it on a single book, and the webpage credited the same source, how do I know that they copied the list from Wikipedia (without acknowledgement)? Because of the way the list was formatted. The formatting was reproduced exactly.
"I found myself in the unusual position of hoping that I had made more mistakes."
We've suffered this in the field of genealogy. Some people have added false information, so that if/when their work is plagiarized, they'll recognize it.
Interesing. However, I think he made a mistake in not pointing out the intellectual laziness (to put the best face on it) of the authors of the book.