Colorful collage with "AI" inside a black circle in the middle surrounded by images including a human profile, brains, maps, laptops, and abstract designs.

Peer Review, Academic Integrity, and AI

BY GARY TOTTEN A highlight of my work as a journal editor is the pleasure of helping authors, especially early career researchers and graduate students, interpret conflicting peer review reports and improve their arguments and writing. The important work of academic journals to disseminate cutting-edge research in a timely manner and thus advance their fields…

Why Monica (Crowley) Matters

BY AARON BARLOW Questions of ‘intellectual property’—oh, how I hate that term—continue to plague us in this new digital age, and in ways never contemplated when patents and copyrights and trademarks and more were first protected by law in the English/American tradition three- and four-hundred years ago. We have built up assumptions of ‘ownership’ without…

Monica Crowley's Massive Plagiarism

BY JOHN K. WILSON CNN is reporting some very important news about talk show host Monica Crowley, Trump’s pick as senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council: she is a plagiarist. And this is not your garden-variety, “oops I copied a few things accidentally” excuse kind of plagiarism. This is massive, systematic, intentional…

The Whistleblower Effect

This is a guest post by Mihran Aroian and Michelle L. Damiani, contributors to the September-October 2015 issue of Academe. Mihran Aroian is a lecturer in the Management Department of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin and was the first faculty member in residence in the Office of the Dean of Students, Student Judicial Services. Raymond…

Surely You're Joking: The Attack on Rick Perlstein

Rick Perlstein’s new book The Invisible Bridge, is sure to anger some conservatives who think Ronald Reagan qualified for sainthood long ago. And it angered one Reagan lover in particular, Craig Shirley, who runs a PR firm for clients like Ann Coulter and Citizens United, and who wrote a book about Reagan 10 years ago…

Plagiarism as a Personal Compulsion or a Postmodern Exercise

In a recent post, Aaron Barlow referenced Shia LaBeouf’s recent plagiarism of much of Justin M. Clowes’s independent short film, Justin M. Damiano, in his own independent short film, HowardCantour.com. I don’t think that it is an exaggeration to assert that exponentially more people have heard or read about the plagiarism than have seen either…

Where's LaBeouf?

“‘Dying is easy, comedy is hard.’ I believe it was Shia LaBeouf who said that,” quipped Jim Carrey at the Golden Globes the other day. Someone always said it before. Maybe not exactly the same, but they said it. Question is, when is it influence, when imitation, and when outright plagiarism? In the Introduction to…

Plagiarism and Cryptomnesia

This is another item that I am re-posting from Futility Closet (www.futilitycloset.com). It is re-posted with the permission of Greg Ross, who maintains the site. You can have daily updates from the site delivered to your e-mail each morning. ______________ Several years after publishing Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson was abashed to discover that he had…

Two Cases of Plagiarism by Politicians

The following piece was written by my former student and friend Mike Lamm. Mike is a reporter for the Decatur Daily Democrat. _________________________ In the summer of 1987, a young, brash Delaware senator by the name of Joe Biden was attempting to become the youngest American since John F. Kennedy to become president of the…