Wow, folks, I have truly arrived. I found a dude in Ukraine who plagiarized me. He Google-translated a passage into English and pasted it into his article. That’s so cute. I’m not even upset because it’s really too cute.
The way I found the plagiarist is funny, too. I’m reading his piece and thinking, “OK, sleeplessness is really getting to me. This paragraph sounds exactly like something I would say. I think I’m losing my mind.” Then finally I realize that it doesn’t sound like my paragraph. It is my paragraph. And my linguistic idiosyncrasies were actually preserved quite well in the English translation.
Back in graduate school, we all had to take a required class on ethical scientific research. I mostly remember the colorful examples of fraudsters who got caught. One was a biochemist who had immigrated to the US from Bulgaria. He made a whole successful academic career out of taking articles published in Bulgarian journals, translating them into English, and publishing them under his own name (this was back in the pre-internet days when that sort of thing was much more difficult to catch). He was finally caught when another Bulgarian scientist who moved to the US opened up a journal and recognized one of his old research papers with someone else’s name on it.
(commenter formerly known as AcademicLurker)
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The original text–was it in Ukraine?
In general, though, academic and scientific dishonest is more prevalent outside of the West than inside of the West:
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/10/scientific-misconduct-by-ancestry-country/
Emil Kirkegaard speculates that the scientifically dishonest people in places like Switzerland are likely to be of foreign origin since the Swiss themselves are very honest, as are Germanic peoples in general.
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Yes, all those Ivy League plagiarists who got million-dollar salaries on the basis of their plagiarized dissertations were definitely located outside of the West.
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Congratulations!
Imitation is the highest form of flattery 😉
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So what action are you going take?
Dreidel
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Other than bragging how famous I am on the blog, you mean? What action can be more enjoyable than that?
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Maybe you have a benevolent view of the situation because of your warmth towards your countrymen, especially in view of recent history, and the nationality of the plagiarist.
Otherwise, plagiarism is never cute — it is the death of any intellectual pursuit and academic enterprise.
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