寻正 

 

我在向俄克拉荷马大学举报麻庭光的海量剽窃之后，麻助教授这一次不道歉了，在科学网的编辑的支持下，他每日发一文，大量被精选，还得意洋洋地宣称寻正打他的假是报复，真没见过这么无耻的人。方舟子被打假，最后只好模糊抄袭剽窃的标准过关，这位麻教授做得更绝，连标准都不用模糊了，直接宣称自己是小偷，但有了自己的思想做基础，小偷小摸嘛，理所应当？ 

 

我此前针对麻庭光的举报有过巨大的心理挣扎，为此跟数位朋友长者教友们讨论，现在看来自己是多么幼稚！人家就没当回事呢。既然如此，麻抄抄以公开挑战写作与学者道德形式向我宣战，我接着就是了，让俄克拉荷马州立大学的学生们看一看他们的教授是什么样的匪类。在此我公开向俄克拉荷马州立大学写的举报信。

此前麻助教授回为我的举报而不得不公开道歉，事后又心有不甘，于是乎对我发起反击，满嘴针对自己本专业胡说八道，我一回击，麻教授就把博文删了，在我举报时还没有证据，这次就提前收集这篇“为当大师，愿做小偷”的雄文。见后。

为做大师，愿为小偷：Big pirate and small pilfer.pdf

 

I am sorry to inform you of irregular activity of one of your faculty in the name of Tingguang Ma. To the best of my knowledge, he was assistant professor in engineering technology.

I came to know Dr. Ma through online blogging and media. At one point I helped him to publish materials rejected by others. On December 15, 2011, prompted by Dr. Ma’s blog posts on air particulate pollution, I studied the topic and found, to my surprise, that Dr. Ma had committed plagiarism in his science writing with large quantity of text copied verbatim from Professor Baoguan Wang (see evidence 2). I openly challenged Dr. Ma and exposed his plagiarism on my blog (see evidence 1). Dr. Ma subsequently openly admitted to my plagiarism charges and apologized (see evidence 3).

I decided not to alert the university because of Dr. Ma’s prompt actions. To Dr. Ma’s credit, in my career of exposing plagiarism, very few authors have taken this level of responsibility.

On April 6, 2012, I received a message from Dr. Ma, who begged me to delete my original post that had exposed him and his plagiarism. I replied promptly that this was new experience and I would consider his request. However, Dr. Ma’s subsequent communications to me pushed me further and further away from granting him his wishes. In particular, I learned that he had not apologized to Professor Wang that he knew personally and he did nothing to his plagiarized articles (see attachment 5 and 6). I failed to see sincere regret of his bad actions in his communication but excuses to exonerate himself.

When I asked if Dr. Ma had apologized to his victim professor Wang, he apologized to professor Wang immediately and I received the emails professor Wang and Dr. Ma exchanged about the matter. Dr. Ma blamed his actions on an old draft he had. I requested him to show the draft to me and professor Wang. Dr. Ma duly complied. In order to add to the strength to his argument, he sent me drafts of the series he wrote. This series contains the identified articles. In total I received 13 drafts. Microsoft Word indicates that they were created from October 2008 to June 2010.

Reading Dr. Ma’s drafts raised my suspicion of additional plagiarism. I randomly selected a few articles to check and to my complete surprise, all the articles I checked contain plagiarism (see evidence 7-13). I responded to Dr. Ma that I could not grant him his wishes and the massive plagiarism I found in his drafts oblige me to write additional exposing posts and alert the Oklahoma State University. American institutions take plagiarism seriously and I did have concerns over the negative impact of my informing the university. I asked him to give me reasons not to report him. He responded that all of those articles are drafts and not published. I was willing to accept it but told him that I may do additional checking on the validity of his claim. He then admitted that one of them had been published with a small royalty.

My systematic checking revealed that at least nine of the 13 articles had been published earlier in whole or modified form (see evidence 7-13). He had submitted three of them to a science popularization competition and published by the hosting media. The one with particular heavy plagiarism won him class C award.

When I checked academic regulations of Oklahoma State University, I found that it is a reputable academic institution with high level of academic integrity. Dr. Ma’s behavior is certainly at odds with university policy and mission. Even though he immediately admitted to plagiarism and apologized, he tried to find excuses for his behavior. To exonerate himself, he had accused me of doing the same thing in a subsequent blog post. In response, I pointed out his lack of professionalism in his own field and demanded him to give evidence that I had also plagiarized in same fashion. He did not answer to my challenge and quietly deleted his post. The sheer amount of plagiarism identified so far of Dr. Ma made me feel that I cannot conceal it from the university.

With this letter, I include all the evidences I had collected. In the process of checking the 13 drafts, I identified another article that he had published on his blog that contains plagiarism. All of the publications have been in Chinese and all of the identified original sources are in Chinese as well. I understand that this adds to cost of university investigation. I try my best to provide English summaries. The university may have to rely on it faculty and students that understand Chinese or other language sources to fully assess the situation.

My intention of informing the university is not to seek severe punishment of Dr. Ma, rather that he should adhere to academic standards maintained at U.S. educational institutions. His plagiarism is not acceptable and he needs additional training in ethical writing. He often maintains a position that science articles are all more or less plagiarism because the writer cannot discover or invent the knowledge himself. Such a position is not acceptable, especially used to support his own plagiarizing activity. To his credit, I want to highlight several fact. First of all, he had openly admitted his wrong and apologized previously. Secondly, professor Wang had spoken on his behalf and believed that he did not intend to plagiarize. Thirdly, plagiarism did happen more often in Chinese writing environment. Dr. Ma’s articles, ironically, containing plagiarized text, are many times targets of plagiarism by others as revealed by my research.