Legal and Ethical Context

Plagiarism falls under the purview of ethics of writing or ethics of scientific writing. There are no separate rules for popular science writing. The rules for plagiarism are consistent. If you violate one set of criteria, you violate all of them. A common misconception is that you can do something in popular science writing that you cannot do with professional journal articles. That is simply not true. We can use any criteria proposed by any scientific body on plagiarism to judge any writing, even if it is not related to science.

Plagiarism is also regulated by law. In U.S., it’s the U.S. copyright law and other statutes related to property and defamation. In China, we have copyright law in effect since 1990. The laws do not distinguish between different types of writing. The rule of play is fair use. The copyright law is the bare minimum of safeguarding intellectual property rights. That is why almost all professional organizations that have significant business related to writing propose their own ethical rules on plagiarism. All such ethics codes agree with each other.

Plagiarism is equivalent to stealing, with the stolen item(s) been abstract and intangible. Let’s cite the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), “Plagiarism is the use of others' published and unpublished ideas or words (or other intellectual property) without attribution or permission, and presenting them as new and original rather than derived from an existing source. The intent and effect of plagiarism is to mislead the reader as to the contributions of the plagiarizer.”

There are four essential aspects of plagiarism. 1) there is an abstract intellectual property owned by someone else; 2) the plagiarizer uses the material; 3) the plagiarizer fails to credit the owner for its ownership and/or to gain permission to use the material; 4) the plagiarizer takes the credit for originality and the associated benefits.

Direct Copying

Many popular science writers, especially those from the Chinese educational system, only have experiences writing for scientific and professional journals previously. In those articles, the referencing style is predetermined and a list of references is always expected. It presents an immediate challenge to those authors when they write for the general public where a list of references is not expected or even unaccepted. Many authors choose to neglect the in-text citing and footnoting of references, assuming that being limited by circumstances, he has no other choice.

Science is about truth and accuracy not only of the content, but also of the manner you present scientific knowledge and facts. When you are limited by publication style where extensive reference list is not expected, you have to rely exclusively on in-text citing. The number one rule in popular science writing to avoid plagiarism charges is, when in doubt, you cite. For at least the minimum you do not want to fulfill all the four criteria of plagiarism.

When I cite WAME, it is clear I have credited my source correctly. There is no risk for misconception that I am the author of the definition. Do I know what plagiarism is? Yes. Can I create my own definition? Yes. Plagiarism is a common phenomenon and the knowledge or fact cannot be owned by anyone. I can very well write my own definition. Nobody will mistake me for creating the concept of plagiarism. Then can I simply erase the quotation marks and neglect WAME altogether? No, because WAME owns the intellectual property to the EXPRESSION of plagiarism with those sentences.

When faced with plagiarism charges, a popular writer in China, Dr. Fang, proposed that common, nonspecific knowledge cannot be owned by anyone, therefore, it’s free for writers to paraphrase others' work and present as if it is his own. The danger for such a proposition is that you can almost get away with any plagiarism with such an excuse. There is no authority on the commonality or specificity of knowledge. Facts cannot be owned according to U.S. copyright law, once this door is open, there is no plagiarism any more.

Let me work on the WAME definition a little bit. I copy it down and modify some words.

Plagiarism is the use of others' ideas, words, tables, figures, or any other intellectual property without attribution and/or permission, and presenting them without disclosing the existing source. The plagiarizer misleads the reader as to the originality of the content.

Now can I pass it on as my writing of definition of plagiarism? No. Some might suggest that I paraphrased WAME. No, absolutely not. It is simply minor modification of WAME’s EXPRESSION. It is still considered as direct copying of WAME statement. In practice this writing can never be in my article. What if I put “WAME said” in front of this expression? It will be misquote even if I do not put quotation marks around it. Misquote does happen and is tolerated in certain circumstance. When I cannot remember exactly how WAME said it, I joggle it down from my memory. It could be in such a format. Then I can put a qualification to the quote, “WAME said something like this”, and then I can present the expression, with or without quotation marks. Here’s the key. I have given my readers as accurate information about this expression as possible. I'm off the hook for plagiarism and misquote. The readers can conclude that the expression is not mine and not exactly as WAME put it, but nonetheless WAME is credited for their originality. The readers should be reminded that when I get away from plagiarism and misquote, it does not mean that it is good journalism. The editor should press me to retrieve the accurate quote.

Paraphrasing

With rampant plagiarism in Chinese media and the accumulation of such charges, paraphrasing becomes a universal excuse to the plagiarizers. There are many facets to paraphrasing. Not everything can be paraphrased. As a general rule, if you paraphrase common knowledge in a particular field, you are a plagiarizer, period.

What is paraphrasing? Paraphrasing is in three forms. 1) the original author’s expression was lengthy, you want to simply his expression; 2) the original author’s expression was short, you want to expand and clarify on his concept; 3) the original author’s expression was unfit for your audience, you customize the expression to fit your audience. The last form could be for situations where the original author writes for a technical audience and you paraphrase for the general public, or simply the original expression is wrote badly and even contains errors. It is always appropriate to paraphrase to get bad writing and errors out of the way. However, be careful with such a claim. If you are capable of such a deed, often you stand at a higher level of understanding and knowledge that paraphrasing the inferior work becomes unnecessary.

With the purposes of paraphrasing in mind, it's rather clear what constitute plagiarism and what is paraphrasing. If your expression is roughly of same length with the original and the key words are the same or similar, there is no need for paraphrasing. You are in the awkward situation where a direct quote is dictated by professional courtesy. If you “forget” to credit the original source, you are a plagiarizer. The evidence is clear and convincing. If you are out of a supermarket with items unpaid for, you may get away by accusing someone else dropping the items into your cart. The jury will immediately judge you guilty if you argue that the apple is now an orange because of some cosmetic surgery you did to it. The apple is always an apple.

Now we can move to truly paraphrasing practice. The golden rule of paraphrasing is that you have to credit original sources. Without such a premise, admitting to paraphrasing is admitting to plagiarism. Earlier in this section I emphasized that if you paraphrase common knowledge, then you are a plagiarizer. The notion is simple. You have limited knowledge of a field and you are forced to plagiarize. Paraphrasing requires extensive knowledge of a field or at least of the topic under discussion. You paraphrase when you do not have the capability to do so, you plagiarize. Invariably, you are also lack of the judgment when to credit a source. For plagiarizers, they always “forget”. It is laughable if you do paraphrase common knowledge and credit wrongfully to a source. It is worse than plagiarism because you should lose credentials to write in this area whereas you may only be sanctioned with plagiarism.

When you correctly paraphrased Einstein of his only-a-few-can-understand works to the public, if you fail to mention Einstein, you are a plagiarizer. The plagiarizers can quickly come up with a rebuttal. It does not seem that we have to mention Einstein all the time when we discuss general or special relativity. Of course not. The public has already been associating those concepts with the Einstein person, whereas in my above sentences I was using his name figuratively for newly emerged geniuses. However, if you like to dream and in your dream you went back to 19th century for some personal glory. You do have to mention Einstein whenever you paraphrase his works.

When plagiarizers “forget” to cite (they always do), many of them consider that as a satisfactory explanation of their actions. The definition of plagiarism and practice of punishing plagiarism have nothing to do with the intention of plagiarizers. Plagiarism is in a domain of intellectual activity and the product is always intentional. Therefore, there is no such thing as unintentional plagiarism. You have sinned or committed a crime; you pay the price, whatever that is.

Conceptual and Structural Similarity

The direct copying and paraphrasing are the easiest forms of plagiarism to recognize. Direct copying is often used by plagiarism detection software to identify potential plagiarism. Conceptual or structural duplication is a higher level of plagiarism and the fine line between duplication and creative work is quite often ambiguous and nonexistent at all in some circumstances. For example, in scientific research, one lab could duplication the conceptual design of an experiment. When A did the experiment on mouse, then B does it on rats.

However, there is a psychological or economical underpinning behind plagiarism that greatly reduces the need to recognize conceptual duplication. What do plagiarizers gain? They claim credit for work they have not done. There is a tendency to do minimum work, i.e., the conceptual duplication rarely occurs in isolation. We can put it differently, if an author put all the effort to write an article conceptually imitating others’ work without direct copying and paraphrasing, unless we have clear evidence, we can assume this author has the right to claim his work as original—only that his originality is limited by existing literature. Conceptual duplication requires effort close to what we would dim as original work and therefore, if it happens in isolation, we tend to give the author partial credit he deserves, sometimes by not calling him a plagiarizer.

Therefore, conceptual similarity is usually secondary and supporting evidence in plagiarism charges. There is of course exception to every rule. If the concepts are small, distinct, and new, the author is obligated to credit the original source. The three properties together make the concept a claimable intellectual property. When you do not cite appropriately, you run the risk of plagiarism. This often happens with journalists who report on new scientific discoveries.

Severity of Plagiarism

People tend to confuse the degree of plagiarism and the identification of plagiarism. An article could have many plagiarism occurrences or a few occurrences. The severity of plagiarism has nothing to do with plagiarism identification. The identification decides if the accused occurrence is plagiarism and it is equivalent to a jury announcing the suspect as guilty or not guilty. Only when the jury announcing that the suspect is guilty, can we start to assess the appropriate punishment for the crime. Guilty of plagiarism does not mean a death sentence automatically. Plagiarizers and their critic often forget about this and they fight over the plagiarism identification as a life and death issue.

Plagiarizers can claim negligence and beg (not demand, as many plagiarizers often do) for leniency when their work contains a few occurrences of plagiarism. Their work can be judged as original overall but with blemishes here and there. In this situation, we say that an ARTICLE CONTAINS PLAGIARISM. If the majority of the work is plagiarized from identified sources, then it is a PLAGIARIZED ARTICLE.

The crude criterion for leniency is that without this plagiarizer’s work, there is a net loss of contribution to the field. We can put it another way. If a lay person can reasonably correct the plagiarism errors with plagiarism identification information, then the work can be judged as of value and leniency is indicated for its author. On the other hand, an expert is required to correct deficiencies; the value of the work is in question. If an expert has to rewrite majority of the article to make it usable, then the work is useless and it is the most severe type of plagiarism. The author should be considered as deliberate cheating regardless of what he says, and be punished accordingly.

The punishment for plagiarism is not all that simple by severity. Every Chinese may have heard the legal principle that you should be punished three times more if you are a member of the legal enforcement. In Nov of 2007, a professor in Missouri School of Journalism had committed plagiarism in his column in a university paper. In 13 paragraphs he had two paragraphs with a few occurrences of copying from another published article. The copying was not exact where many plagiarizers in China would likely claim paraphrasing. Even though he was internationally renowned, had been contributing to the paper for decades, and had apologized profusely, he was immediately sacked. You simply cannot expect a professor of journalism or someone who regularly profess moral standard to have such behaviors. The errors can certainly be corrected by a lay person very easily. Another person in his pants may deserve a second chance.

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