Anyone else taken a bit aback by this NY Times article? Being the social scientist that I am, I have no idea what goes on in med schools. Still, I was a bit surprised by the notion that faculty would regularly allow drug company employees to write their peer reviewed articles for them.
What struck me as odder, though, was this:
Arthur L. Caplan, director of the Penn’s Center for Bioethics, said there was a difference in degree, if not in kind, between ghostwriting and plagiarism. Faculty members who sign their names to ghostwritten papers for research credit usually have some agreement with the paper, he said, even if, improperly, they did not write it. Students who plagiarize a paper may know nothing about the subject.
Now, it seems to me that plagiarism at the undergraduate level is taken to include quite a bit more than just handing in a paper someone else wrote. Where I’m from, a few missing quotation marks, forgotten footnotes, and the like, can get an undergrad in just as much hot water.
So I thought I’d look into it. I googled ‘plagiarism policy’, and the first US school to come up was Rutgers. From their policy:
Plagiarism is the representation of the words or ideas of another as one’s own in any academic work. To avoid plagiarism, every direct quotation must be identified by quotation marks, or by appropriate indentation, and must be cited properly according to the accepted format for the particular discipline. Acknowledgment is also required when material from any source is paraphrased or summarized in whole or in part in one’s own words. To acknowledge a paraphrase properly, one might state: to paraphrase Plato’s comment… and conclude with a footnote or appropriate citation to identify the exact reference. A footnote acknowledging only a directly quoted statement does not suffice to notify the reader of any preceding or succeeding paraphrased material.
In short, plagiarism as academically defined is pretty damned easy for an ususpecting, underinformed undergrad to commit. Those of us who deal with them regularly will know this. Certainly, letting someone else write an entire paper for you is above and beyond the minimum requirements for plagiarism as conventionally defined.
What these med school profs stand accused of, of course, is actually worse. It’s a) miscrediting of knowledge and argument (plagiarism) and b) misrepresentation of that material as non-biased. In other words, it’s academically and medically unsound.
Why on Earth would anyone get away with this?