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I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

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Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#71
I've read a couple of Dawson books in the John Milton series but gave up as The Grey Man covers similar ground and seems mostly better crafted.

Not to excuse anything but would be interesting to understand if some of this is potentially a result of using automated tools; I don't actually know what pulp writers use in their work.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#72

Off topic, but on Friday the minister of Science and Higher Education in Norway had to step down, after someone found out about 22 % of her master thesis was plagiarized. Why did someone look into this? Because she and her department is taking a case against a student to our highest court about "self plagiarism", which everyone thinks is unfair. So quite ironic she was the real plagiarist. And then media jumped on th…

I got accused of plagiarizing myself once, and I've never even figured out what that phrase means.

Isn't the assumption supposed to be that anything I haven't cited is my idea? What does it matter if it's not the first time I had the idea? It's not less mine because I still have it.

I could sort of understand if I had published it somewhere and somehow given rights to it to another party, but this was just some random college philosophy paper.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#73

Off topic, but on Friday the minister of Science and Higher Education in Norway had to step down, after someone found out about 22 % of her master thesis was plagiarized. Why did someone look into this? Because she and her department is taking a case against a student to our highest court about "self plagiarism", which everyone thinks is unfair. So quite ironic she was the real plagiarist. And then media jumped on th…

Is there documentation of this 22% figure?

The implication is that it's large paragraphs of solid work stolen from a fellow researcher in the field. But it could just as easily mean 22% of her text was scattered with cliches, idioms and excerpts from legislation (or other standard texts) if someone with an agenda was interpreting the results.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#74
post #72

Off topic, but on Friday the minister of Science and Higher Education in Norway had to step down, after someone found out about 22 % of her master thesis was plagiarized. Why did someone look into this? Because she and her department is taking a case against a student to our highest court about "self plagiarism", which everyone thinks is unfair. So quite ironic she was the real plagiarist. And then media jumped on th…

I got accused of plagiarizing myself once, and I've never even figured out what that phrase means. Isn't the assumption supposed to be that anything I haven't cited is my idea? What does it matter if it's not the first time I had the idea? It's not less mine because I still have it. I could sort of understand if I had published it somewhere and somehow given rights to it to another party, but this was just some rando…

You cannot copy from yourself. Reusing material and passing it off as new, no matter its author, is plagiarism.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in high school/university, they taught us that plagarism was taking even ideas and reusing them directly. Copying a sentence like that was an explicit example, even if generic. We were told that it gets suspicious at even 4 more complex words that are the same. Even reusing your own work between classes was an example of plagiarism. Plagiarism, at least as presented to me, is a very strict standard.

I’ve heard that about self-plagiarism and I think it’s idiotic. You should be able to reuse your own sentences or ideas. Specially ideas. Which cannot be copyrighted (yet). Somebody show cage Michael Tomasello right now. Open any of his books and you’ll see a series of self-plagiarism sentences. I now think he’s just a genius because he’s investigated his field in depth

Nobody says you can't - you just need to cite the source, your previous work.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#77
post #45

This is plagiarism by any academic or artistic standard, but as a commercial or legal matter, this level of copying doesn't come close to copyright infringement. And no one should want it to.

Plagiarism is not a crime, it’s an ethical foul.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#78

Off topic, but on Friday the minister of Science and Higher Education in Norway had to step down, after someone found out about 22 % of her master thesis was plagiarized. Why did someone look into this? Because she and her department is taking a case against a student to our highest court about "self plagiarism", which everyone thinks is unfair. So quite ironic she was the real plagiarist. And then media jumped on th…

Is there documentation of this 22% figure? The implication is that it's large paragraphs of solid work stolen from a fellow researcher in the field. But it could just as easily mean 22% of her text was scattered with cliches, idioms and excerpts from legislation (or other standard texts) if someone with an agenda was interpreting the results.

You can have those 22%, no question, but then you have to cite the source which the minister apparently didn't.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#79
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there documentation of this 22% figure? The implication is that it's large paragraphs of solid work stolen from a fellow researcher in the field. But it could just as easily mean 22% of her text was scattered with cliches, idioms and excerpts from legislation (or other standard texts) if someone with an agenda was interpreting the results.

You can have those 22%, no question, but then you have to cite the source which the minister apparently didn't.

No, you don't need to cite cliches. Nor do you need to paraphrase legislation or other technical texts so obliquely that not a single phrase of it will be detected by a text matching algorithm.

Nor do the tools have a human level understanding of what has or has not been cited properly.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in high school/university, they taught us that plagarism was taking even ideas and reusing them directly. Copying a sentence like that was an explicit example, even if generic. We were told that it gets suspicious at even 4 more complex words that are the same. Even reusing your own work between classes was an example of plagiarism. Plagiarism, at least as presented to me, is a very strict standard.

I’ve heard that about self-plagiarism and I think it’s idiotic. You should be able to reuse your own sentences or ideas. Specially ideas. Which cannot be copyrighted (yet). Somebody show cage Michael Tomasello right now. Open any of his books and you’ll see a series of self-plagiarism sentences. I now think he’s just a genius because he’s investigated his field in depth

Yeah I think the recent conservative witch hunts on liberal academics in American may have set this off as a weak point to attack of those who have more academic degrees. I assume the opposite will take off eventually as well.
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