Tom Lehrer has a wonderful song about a (fictionalized) mathematician named Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky who made his career by publishing other's work as his own. Lehrer includes in the song Lobachevsky's advice to a young student, "Plagiarize, Let no one else's work evade your eyes, Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, So don't shade your eyes, But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize - only be sure please always to call it research." (http://www.casualhacker.net/tom.lehrer/revisited.html#lobachevsky)

TAA Executive Director Richard T. Hull explores the muddy waters of plagiarism.

Lehrer's song was a spoof of the almost ubiquitous claim of Soviet scientists to have discovered everything first. But behind it is a deeper and darker, much more complex set of cultural phenomena, our own, and others'.

Recently, Australians have started an online journal that deals with "matters of academic rectitude, including soft marking, fraud, and other forms of academic dishonesty, as well as plagiarism." (I had to look up "soft marking": it is giving inflated grades to full-tuition-paying students.) Published twice a year, the International Journal for Educational Integrity "seeks to examine the theme of plagiarism in Australia, particularly in relation to the country's historically high number of international students among whom English is not a first language." (David Cohen, "Australian Scholars, Beset With Plagiarism, Inaugurate new Journal on Academic Integrity" (http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/12/2005121608n.htm).

When I was first a graduate student teaching my first sections of Introduction to Philosophy, my Chair advised me to carefully scrutinize student papers to be sure no one got away with presenting someone else's work as his or her own. I remember the combination of exasperation and triumph upon finding one student's term paper that began, "In the last chapter we have shown . . . ."

The purchase and misrepresentation of other's term papers, and even dissertations, has become so common that a small business has sprung up offering software and databases that use crawlers to search for other papers on the web, offering highlighted comparisons of passages found to be similar or identical. An online article by Robert Harris discusses the issue of student plagiarism, and provides links to commercial services that offer plagiarism detection: http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm.

In my later years of teaching Graduate Research Ethics, we included a unit on plagiarized work for incoming first year graduate students, many of whom were foreign trained. It seems that in some other cultures, one shows mastery of one's professors' work, or any other work, by being able to reiterate it word for word on examinations and papers. Rooting out this cultural expression of respect proved surprisingly difficult.

But the most interesting cases of plagiarizing were ones that came to me as a member of a faculty ethics committee, where well-established faculty were shown to have plagiarized their own work! Often such accusations and disclosures were met by the aggrieving faculty member with astonishment, as though the very notion of stealing one's own work were inconceivable. "How could I steal what is mine?!" was the common initial response.

Of course, the issue is not so much stealing one's own work as misrepresenting it as newly-confirmed research results. A journal has a strong interest in its publications being new and fresh, not reprints of work first appearing elsewhere. As we began to point this out to offending faculty, sometimes a realization would break across their faces as though a novel idea had just been presented.

Sometimes a scholar is invited to expand on remarks previously made in print. It is mightily difficult (and I am guilty of this) not to succumb to the temptation to quote part of your own work as a frame for whatever expansive remarks occur after the fact, or to reuse a particularly apt example. Other times, it seems, a request to a recognized scholar for a piece in an inaugural issue of a new journal is most easily accommodated with a simple reprint, perhaps with a new title and even with an enhanced set of authors (perhaps one's graduate students), of a previous work. These practices shade into increasingly false representations of truths the trust in which academic scholarship depends. They also take up scarce journal space that otherwise would be available for other, original work.

Mindful of the tendency to unwittingly quote from one's own or others' work (perhaps supported by sloppy note taking), a new software program has been devised by computer science faculty to assist scholars in avoiding inadvertent plagiarism. Titled "SPlaT," the software tool promises to help avoid "cryptomnesia" (oddly defined as "reusing one's own previously published text while unaware of its existence"), and can be also used to guard against inadvertent plagiarism from papers in some specified repository of works, as well as to check a paper under review against the author's previously published work. Details and a downloadable copy may be found at http://splat.cs.arizona.edu/

Another area of potential plagiarism involves review of unpublished manuscripts and unfunded grant applications. Reviewers are supposed not to take advantage of their positions as first readers of the intellectual children of others, but suspicions abound that that privileged position is too often abused. A recent call from an individual not a member of TAA about his suspicions regarding a protracted period of review (8 months!) of a book manuscript by a young scholar who was also involved in publishing on the same topic prompted several suggestions about communication between the inquirer's editor and the reviewer's editor that might either put the suspicions to rest or confirm them. At least in the case of institutional review boards, a legally enforceable obligation not to disclose or otherwise profit from reading research proposals holds for all members of such boards. Easily said, but not easily avoided.

Writing as we do in a common language, the distinction between plagiarism and use of cultural verbal icons is surprisingly difficult to define. Moreover, as language is the vehicle of ideas, it is a rare active researcher who has not profited from insights communicated at a poster session, colloquium talk, in a manuscript or grant review, or in casual conversation. Even the most well-known scholars have fallen victim to their own memories, with apt phrases coming to mind in the creative process, often under the pressure of deadlines, the origins of which aren't immediately evident.

So plagiarism of self and others is a human failing against which we must guard ourselves and must caution our students. Integrity in an age of increased accessibility to the digitized printed word is hard to achieve, even for us who didn't learn out ethics from Tom Lehrer.