Plagiarism: Words and ideas
Physics and Society
2008-08-25 v1 Physics Education
Abstract
Plagiarism is a crime against academy. It deceives readers, hurts plagiarized authors, and gets the plagiarist undeserved benefits. However, even though these arguments do show that copying other people's intellectual contribution is wrong, they do not apply to the copying of words. Copying a few sentences that contain no original idea (e.g. in the introduction) is of marginal importance compared to stealing the ideas of others. The two must be clearly distinguished, and the 'plagiarism' label should not be used for deeds which are very different in nature and importance. Keywords: academic dishonesty; academic integrity; academic misconduct; cheating; copyright infringement; ethics; intellectual property; research misconduct
Cite
@article{arxiv.0803.1526,
title = {Plagiarism: Words and ideas},
author = {Mathieu Bouville},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0803.1526},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
8 pages