Plagiarized

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. 

7 thoughts on “Plagiarized

  1. 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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    1. 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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  2. 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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