Or maybe the problem is that when plagiarism is identified, people try too hard to explain the pressures giving rise to it. Academic research that is just minor variation is indeed destructive of intellectual culture, but not at all in the same way as plagiarism.  The appropriate reaction to academics who produce dull iterations of old arguments is to ignore them and hope that they go away.  The appropriate reaction to plagiarists is to expel them from the academic community.  I think Gary's argument make too many excuses.

The ease of detection through Google is probably outweighed by the increased volume of material now published - there's so much for plagiarists to choose from! I suspect that there really is more plagiarism than before, and that it is because there is an attenuated sense of loyalty to the intellectual virtues.

--James

James Greenstein



--- "Gary Mongiovi" <MONGIOVG@stjohns.edu> wrote:
 
I think there is a tremendous amount of pressure on academics to increase their research output--another example of the corporate mentality penetrating into every corner of modern existence. (Even the terminology is corporate: output and productivity are words that get slung around my academic workplace way too much for my taste.) One response to this is to grind out so much work that  (usually) inadvertent plagiarism is almost bound to occur. Another way to go (rampant in economics, my discipline) is to  generate variation after pointless minor variation on some obscure and generally uninteresting theme.  Plagiarism gets a lot of attention, but the other response is just as destructive of the intellectual culture. 
 
Gary