The Rising Rate of Plagiarism, Careless Citation Practice, Bad Grammar, and Failure to Read (and I’m Not Talking About the Students)

In many editorials, we try to highlight cutting-edge issues in higher education or information services, or we try to suggest areas for solid new research or innovative analysis. This month’s statement, however, may be viewed by some readers as just a rant, or as fussing over something old and tired. It is both. It is an exhortation to our colleagues to adhere to traditional measures of integrity, and to seek a higher level of excellence, ethics, and precision. Our inbox yields an increasing number of manuscripts that suffer from more than just casual typographical errors; they reveal an indifference toward, or ignorance of, standard scholarly practices. This risks discrediting the authors, the journal, the publisher, and the profession.

We are seeing an increasing number of writings that reveal overt plagiarism, inadvertent plagiarism, self-plagiarism, inadequate or uncited paraphrasing, or a lack of knowledge of how to summarize an idea in one’s own words; concepts we thought were supposed to be learned at a far earlier stage in one’s education. We recently had to send back a manuscript with explicit instructions to the author to differentiate their sources more clearly, to paraphrase, and to reduce the excessive use of lengthy quotations, which seemed to reveal an absence of new original thought and was verging on plagiarism. The author seemed genuinely puzzled as to how to do this. We had to decline an article for having already been published, because the lion’s share of it was identical to a working paper by the author, publicly disseminated through a research web site. Again, the author seemed to think there was nothing wrong with such dual publication despite our formal guidelines to the contrary. With an author who cites his or her own prior work, we have had to craft arbitrary rules of thumb for identifying the percentage of new work in order to discourage an approach that can at best be termed minor and insubstantial incrementalism. What proportion of an article must be new - and how new is new - before we as editors feel that it has not already been published? If an author reads a paper at a conference and the conference proceedings are officially online, we consider that prior publication. If the conference only publishes the abstracts, or if the author has significantly extended the scope of the research or the depth of analysis, then the paper submitted may be not at all what has already been published.

Another trend is that authors utilize sloppy and inconsistent citation practices, turning in manuscripts with badly formatted footnotes, missing or inaccurate author names, partial pagination, or citations to informal or electronic resources without reference to an accessible verifiable version. More and more, authors seem to expect that editors will magically reformat and repopulate all of their citations using swift and accurate publishing software. Even if the existing software were powerful enough to do that reliably, which it is not, it is still the author’s responsibility to undertake the careful preparation of footnotes, ensuring accuracy and using the official style required by a given journal.

It is widely decried in the public media that there is a decline in competency in grammar, syntax, sentence construction, and, sad to say, formulation of sequential thought. Listen to any scripted television show or read a major newspaper to verify the truth of this assertion. Smugly, naively, we think that in a profession as learned as ours, surely that is not the case. But we see startling lapses in grammar, and these are not limited to papers written by authors for whom English is not a native language. If it were simply a misplaced “however,” that’s the kind of fix that can be done in routine copy-editing. We see egregious and numerous instances of misplaced modifiers, improper noun-verb agreement, incorrect pronoun case, faulty parallel construction, and sentences where the thoughts do not follow logically from the first clause to the second. Perhaps authors assume that a quick once-over with the...