Plagiarism is in the news a lot these days. In January of 2002, the best-selling historian Stephen Ambrose was accused of copying passages from Thomas Childer's The Wings of Morning in his own new book, The Wild Blue. Journalists following up on the first allegations found that similar close or verbatim "borrowed" wording appeared in a number of other books by Ambrose. Similar instances of "borrowing" were identified soon thereafter in several works by Doris Kearns Goodwin, another high-profile historian who has admitted to sloppy note-taking but not to intentional use of other people's words. Debates have raged as to severity of the lapses by these two writers. But nearly all of the examples put forward in the media would certainly constitute plagiarism by the definition we use in Boston University and in academia generally.
In a January 10, 2002 article in the New York Times, David Kirkpatrick wrote that both the Ambrose and Childers books "tell the stories of World War II bomber pilots. Professor Ambrose included footnotes in his book acknowledging that Professor Childers's book was a source of information in the relevant pages. But Professor Ambrose does not acknowledge quoting from the book or borrowing phrases or wording." Kirkpatrick went on to show two examples:
1. Childers wrote, "Up,
up, up, groping through the clouds for what seemed like an eternity." He added
later, "No amount of practice could have prepared them for what they
encountered. B-24's, glittering like mica, were popping up out of the clouds
all over the sky."
Ambrose wrote: "Up, up, up he went, until he got above the clouds. No amount
of practice could have prepared the pilot and crew for what they encountered
-- B-24's, glittering like mica, were popping up out of the clouds over here,
over there, everywhere."
2. Childers wrote,
"Howard struggled to master the internal electronics of the radio, building
generators, studying vacuum tubes and amplifiers, transformers and
transmitters. He disassembled the sets, examined the intricate ganglia of
tubes and wires, and reassembled them blindfolded."
Ambrose wrote, "He mastered the internal electronics of the radio, built
generators, studied vacuum tubes and amplifiers, transformers and
transmitters. He learned to disassemble a set, then reassemble it
blindfolded."
Pretty sleazy, don't you think? If you don't see why Ambrose's passages are unacceptable by conventional academic standards, you need to brush up on your understanding of plagiarism. Consult the BUSPH Student Handbook as well as Hacker's A Writer's Reference, listed among the useful references earlier in these pages. And ask yourself: why would a writer of popular history--or any other subject--want to adhere so closely to someone else's wording? Doesn't he know his stuff? And if the image of B-24s "glittering like mica" is so uniquely suited to the description, doesn't it merit quotation marks and a clear attribution to the guy who originated it?
Graduate students, who we like to believe have the best intentions, still often have difficulty paraphrasing and using direct quotations accurately; manipulating these strategies well takes attention and practice. The results are worth the effort. The following page briefly demonstrates how authors of an article in The American Journal of Public Health handled many sources in a relatively short stretch of prose.