Plagiarism is not a victimless offence

When my son was applying to college, he received a recruitment letter from the University of Pennsylvania. On the envelope was a quotation attributed to Benjamin Franklin, UPenn’s founder: “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”

But which 18th-century American founding father would have ever said “involve me?” A little research indicated that the aphorism had also been cited as a Navajo or Chinese proverb. The etymologist Barry Popik concludes that a very similar statement was made by a motivational speaker named Herbert True in 1978. Benjamin Franklin never said it.

I contacted the UPenn admissions department, who assured me that the marketing department – responsible for the envelope – would never use a fake quotation. Despite my request, marketing never contacted me.

My observation did not appear to lead to much institutional soul-searching. UPenn president Amy Gutmann, chair of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, continued to attribute the statement to Franklin. It featured prominently, too, in the university’s 2015 commencement programme and even appeared on the final page of the UPenn 2018-19 financial report; I hope they audit their numbers better than their quotations. I also heard the chair of the faculty senate attribute it to Franklin at my son’s UPenn commencement (yes, he attended despite the erroneous citation).

Clearly UPenn wants to suggest that the same maxim embodies both the principle of the institution’s foundation by America’s greatest polymath and its current pedagogical principle. Nevertheless, it is disturbing that an institution dedicated to scholarship would engage in such a thorough distortion of the historical record.

I was reminded of this matter by recent articles in Times Higher Education and elsewhere suggesting that plagiarism – defined by US regulations as “the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit” – should not be punished. Such apologists seem to believe that plagiarism is merely an issue of intellectual-property protection: ideas should be shared freely without having to submit to those with tenuous claims to immutable truths.

However, the more pertinent question is what motivates those who plagiarise. Their behaviour is fundamentally dishonest. They steal the results or actual text of others and present them as their own. Moreover, it is not primarily the harm to the originators of the scholarly contributions that is relevant. Their actions render all the material they present as untrustworthy.

But does it really matter, for instance, who first discerned that Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge was based on the biblical story of Saul and David? Does it really matter that students are submitting essays that rely on the late US English studies professor Julian Moynahan’s work without citing it? Especially given that Hardy himself committed this act of “plagiarism”?

Perhaps not. In the sciences, however, proper attribution can be quite consequential. Plagiarised text or data might originate from an article that has been corrected or retracted. Corporations have been known to “ghostwrite” articles that have other individuals as claimed authors in order to promote or protect their own products. Recently, the research of a number of courageous investigators has shown that some companies reconstitute novel papers from pre-existing data, text and phrasal templates and sell them to “scientists” who publish the collages under their own names. Such plagiarism obscures the bias of the originators of the results or composition.

In my own experience as an analyst of the scientific literature, I have encountered much plagiarism. In the life sciences, review articles are cited more often on average than research articles, so researchers tend to proliferate the number of review articles on which they are listed as an author in order to boost their “h-index”, a manipulable pseudometric of researcher productivity. Short cuts, including the extensive recycling of text that one or more of the review authors have previously published, are disturbingly common. In other cases, review articles broadly plagiarise the articles of others.

Plagiarism can even have fatal consequences. In scientific literature, it is common for text to include numbers and units using special characters such as Greek letters. But copying and pasting such units can result in their alteration. I have encountered examples of highly problematic articles, including, for example, a plagiarised text that substituted mg (milligram) for µg (microgram), resulting in a thousand-fold increase in the reported concentration required for the effectiveness of a drug. Certainly, unit errors can be introduced into any article during the publication process, but authors are far less likely to proofread carefully a section of an article that they did not even write.

The response to the coronavirus outbreak is a perfect example of the importance of proper citation. Members of the public are taking action on the basis of poorly sourced and misattributed information. If we allow the scholarly literature itself to abandon its adherence to ethical standards of citation, the situation would be even worse.

Rather than reducing their emphasis on fighting plagiarism, academic organisations should redouble their efforts to combat it and defy the post-truth ethos. An institution of higher education should not be propagating a historical lie.

As Benjamin Franklin actually did say (at least, according to the 1740 edition of the almanack Poor Richard’s Maxims): “Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools that have not wit enough to be honest.”

David A. Sanders is an associate professor of biological sciences at Purdue University.