Avoiding Plagiarism

Estimated read time: 1:20

Summary

The video discusses the prevalence of plagiarism not just among students but also among faculty members, including those at high academic positions. It delves into the various excuses given for plagiarism, such as lack of knowledge or pressure and deadlines, and emphasizes the importance of understanding and avoiding plagiarism. Advanced technology like Turnitin and Authenticate is mentioned as crucial tools in detecting plagiarism, holding academics accountable, and maintaining the integrity of research. The talk also stresses the significance of proper citation to credit original ideas and avoid self-plagiarism, highlighting the cultural and educational background influences on understanding plagiarism.

Highlights

Finding plagiarism issues in high academic circles shows it's a widespread problem 😯.
'I didn't know it was wrong' is the top excuse for plagiarism 🤔.
Use technology like Turnitin to protect your work from plagiarism accusations 🔍.
Citing sources is essential to credit original ideas and prevent self-plagiarism 🎓.
Cultural perceptions of plagiarism vary, but it remains a critical issue globally 🌎.
Writing is challenging, and the struggle can tempt shortcuts, emphasizing the need for ethical commitment ✍️.
Academic careers can be destroyed by plagiarism scandals, as seen with some university presidents 🏛️.

Key Takeaways

Plagiarism is not just a student's issue; faculty members can also be guilty of it 😮.
Common excuses for plagiarism include 'I didn't know' and blaming students or deadlines 😅.
Advanced tools like Turnitin and Authenticate help detect plagiarism 🌐.
Proper citation helps build academic integrity and acknowledges original ideas 📚.
Cultural and educational backgrounds can affect perceptions of plagiarism 🌏.
The pressure to produce work can lead to plagiarism, but maintaining ethical standards is crucial ⚖️.
Even university presidents have been caught plagiarizing, showing no one's above scrutiny 👀.

Overview

Plagiarism is often perceived as a problem exclusive to students, but it's surprisingly prevalent among faculty, including professors and even university presidents. This video highlights the intricate issue of plagiarism within academia and the varied reasons individuals give when caught—most commonly citing ignorance or blaming others. The narrative exposes how high academic stakes and the pressure to publish can hinder ethical decision-making, making plagiarism a critical topic for all academic levels.

In a world where technology plays a pivotal role in academic integrity, tools like Turnitin and Authenticate are more important than ever. The video discusses how these tools aid in identifying unoriginal content, ensuring accountability among scholars, and elevating the standard of research integrity. As technology evolves, so does the necessity for awareness and careful attention to plagiarism, making it paramount for both students and faculty to familiarize themselves with these resources.

The speaker further explains the nuances of plagiarism, including self-plagiarism where individuals might mistakenly submit previous work as new. Emphasizing the significance of proper citation and the challenges of writing, the video underlines the importance of recognizing intellectual theft not only as a breach of academic conduct but also as an ethical failure. Through engaging anecdotal cases, the content portrays plagiarism not as a mere academic offense but as a serious issue threatening the very foundation of scholarly work.

Chapters

00:00 - 01:30: Introduction and Overview This chapter provides an introduction and overview of the topic. It begins with a mention of a report from the National Science Foundation, indicating some recent inquiries or investigations. The chapter is setting the stage for detailed exploration in the subsequent sections.
01:30 - 03:00: Plagiarism in Academia The chapter titled 'Plagiarism in Academia' focuses on plagiarism among faculty members, such as scientists and professors, rather than students. It explores research into why these individuals, who are well-informed and typically involved in high-level academic activities like submitting federal research grants, commit plagiarism. The chapter challenges the common perception that plagiarism is primarily a student issue.
03:00 - 04:30: Plagiarism Detection Software The chapter discusses the prevalence of plagiarism, highlighting that individuals at various academic levels, including assistant associates and full professors, have been found guilty and faced penalties. It emphasizes the importance of awareness regarding plagiarism, stating that even undergraduate students are often familiar with the concept. The importance of educating individuals about plagiarism is reinforced by mandates from the federal government, which requires educational institutions to inform their members about it.
04:30 - 06:30: Case Study: Plagiarism Excuses The chapter titled 'Case Study: Plagiarism Excuses' discusses the common reactions and excuses given by individuals when confronted with allegations of plagiarism. It highlights a recurring cycle where people claim they have already been informed about plagiarism, leaving an impression of skepticism regarding their sincerity. The uncertainty persists on whether this is merely an excuse or a genuine unawareness. The chapter emphasizes that the most prevalent excuse for plagiarism is deflection of blame to others, such as students or graduate students.
06:30 - 08:30: Definition and Types of Plagiarism The chapter discusses the confusion surrounding plagiarism among students and faculty. It includes an introduction to the topic, mentioning that many people are unaware that certain actions may be considered plagiarism. The speaker references the National Science Foundation (NSF) and introduces plagiarism detection software such as Turnitin, indicating the complexities involved in understanding what constitutes plagiarism.
08:30 - 11:30: Impact of Plagiarism in Academia The chapter discusses the use of authentication systems in academia, particularly for detecting plagiarism in documents. It mentions that Texas Tech has a license for such a system, which is primarily used for manuscripts and senior theses rather than undergraduate coursework. The limitation is due to the system's inability to effectively detect undergraduate-level issues.
11:30 - 15:30: Avoiding Plagiarism This chapter focuses on avoiding plagiarism, specifically using tools like SafeAssign in academic settings. It discusses how professors can use SafeAssign to scan student work for potential plagiarism and the process of sending these results back to faculty. It also mentions that new users often have questions regarding the interpretation of these reports.
15:30 - 20:00: Writing Difficulties and Plagiarism The chapter discusses the common issues writers face, particularly focusing on determining what constitutes plagiarism. It highlights how individuals often seek validation for the percentage of potentially plagiarized content without understanding that they need to evaluate the context and appropriateness of the used material. A critical point is made about the responsibility of the writer to discern if the text has been properly attributed or if it constitutes inappropriate use, rather than simply relying on automated percentage indicators.
20:00 - 27:30: Citing Sources and Academic Integrity The chapter discusses the importance of understanding and adhering to academic integrity and the correct citation of sources. It highlights a case study from Great Britain involving a heart doctor pursuing an additional degree. The case is used to emphasize the issues arising when individuals either don't understand or choose not to engage in proper intellectual work. This reflects broader concerns about maintaining academic standards and the potential problems of intellectual negligence.
27:30 - 32:00: Final Thoughts on Plagiarism The chapter discusses an incident involving a graduate student who submitted a 4000-word essay that was found to be 88% plagiarized. The initial excuse provided by the student was that the plagiarism was due to spell check.

Avoiding Plagiarism Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 [Music] it's interesting um i just got a report yesterday sent to me from national science foundation and they have done some inquiries or investigations
00:30 - 01:00 some research actually into scientists professors assistant professors that have been found guilty of plagiarism to find out why they did what they did so what's interesting about this from your perspective is that when you hear plagiarism discussed you always think about it as being a student problem and faculty are well informed these are obviously people that submitted federal research grants these
01:00 - 01:30 are people that are assistant associates sometimes full professors that have been found guilty of plagiarism and suffered penalties from it and so that so as so how many of you have heard about plagiarism even as undergrads a lot already okay and you could hear about again today thank you for showing up by the way they tell the federal government that nobody ever taught them about this stuff so the federal government says teach your people about plagiarism and
01:30 - 02:00 then i teach people about plagiarism and they're like we've heard this already and so it's it's it's this interesting cycle now i don't know if they truly never heard about plagiarism or if it's the excuse they give when they're faced with an allegation nobody knows the answer to that question all right but the interesting thing is that i there's a slide in here where i say the most common excuse that's given for plagiarism is i didn't do it somebody else did my student did my graduate student did
02:00 - 02:30 it i didn't do it actually that's now number two number one is i didn't know that this was wrong nobody ever taught me about it so we're going to talk about plagiarism today let me pull up my slides so plagiarism based on what i just told you from nsf confuses some students and it also confuses a lot of faculty now plagiarism detection software turnitin
02:30 - 03:00 and for professionals authenticate is a system that's used to scan a document to assess if there's any text in it that has been lifted from other sources and it's texas tech has a license for as undergraduates you cannot have a user account but if you're working on a manuscript with a mentor or you're working on a senior thesis we'll scan your documents for you we don't do undergraduate coursework all right because our system doesn't really catch the problems that undergraduates have it's the system is
03:00 - 03:30 actually designed for professional publication but if in fact you want to use something uh the blackboard system has a software program called safeassign have any of your professors use this with you okay where you can scan your work and save a sign all right so i'll run a scan for faculty and i'll send them the results and the most frequent question i get from for new people who have never seen this before is well i see that the document so this is
03:30 - 04:00 fine right and i'm like well that's not for me to decide that's for you to decide all right so they look at a number it might say twenty percent it might say thirty percent it could say ten percent they're like this is fine right it's just ten percent i said well no you actually have to go through the document make some decisions as to whether or not text that you've utilized has appropriately been utilized or inappropriately been utilized but the interesting thing is that they ask me or
04:00 - 04:30 they try to assert this is all right correct so either they don't understand or they just don't really want to do the intellectual work and that either of those in my opinion is a problem so it's fine isn't it well 30 starts to worry me so here's a case i like to always like to start with case studies as you know and this was in great britain uh it was a physician a heart doctor who was going back for an additional degree
04:30 - 05:00 in business all right so as a student he does an assignment and he hands in an essay i think it's 4 000 word essay as a graduate student and it was 88 percent plagiarized 88 had been lifted from other sources physician is a practicing physician okay and so they say hey we have a problem here look at the scan and he goes oh well that was not me that was due to spell check that was his first excuse
05:00 - 05:30 all right now you guys have all used spell check right i've used spell check the only thing that spell check problem that spell check provides is that i'm not as good of a speller now than when i was in the sixth grade because spell check has made me very lazy all right but i don't really see how you blame spell check for plagiarism all right so that didn't work so then he goes well i ran my own scan here's my results it only shows two percent or three percent i can't remember what the number is it's up there
05:30 - 06:00 then they found out he had falsified a scan to make it look like his document was only two or three percent from other sources so his excuse for plagiarism was to falsify a document now those of you who have already uh heard me talk about some of these issues with regard to responsible conduct you know that falsification is a big no-no so plagiarism is a big no-no all right
06:00 - 06:30 so he actually falsified the document to excuse when he got in trouble he was actually suspended for nine months for misconduct but also as you see we know what his name is and anybody can actually find out that information when he is applying for jobs in the future so uh these cases are not private they're not the identities are not held when somebody's found guilty of misconduct these documents and these incidents are very very public all right now again
06:30 - 07:00 he might not have understood plagiarism or he didn't care all right now if you don't care i can't really control that but not understanding i can and i have conversations on this regularly so if you ever have doubts and you're working on a document you can call me all right i know the bridges folks over there they know me a little bit but anyone else in the room if you ever have questions or concerns you actually can
07:00 - 07:30 contact me all right so what is plagiarism it is theft of words theft of ideas it is basically theft of intellectual property all right and i know you've heard this before all right it is part of the federal definition of research misconduct according to texas tech code of student code of conduct and texas tech policy it is academic scholarly misconduct all
07:30 - 08:00 right and it is included in the big three that the federal government defined three not four or three that the federal government defines as misconduct fabrication falsification plagiarism so the reason i always bring this up is that if anybody has ever told you it is not a big deal don't worry about it i want you to listen to me today this is a huge concern and you actually have to address it actively not just hope for the best so why should you care i always have to
08:00 - 08:30 tell you why to care about these number one authenticate turnitin google scholar safeassign all of these tools exist now when technology evolves and it gives us the opportunity to protect ourselves it becomes essential that you use them because you have tools that i did not have when i was in school all right when i was in school when i was when i first
08:30 - 09:00 learned about this probably in high school or grade school plagiarism was copying out of a dusty book in a library and the odds of somebody finding those words from a dusty book in the library were very very thin all right that's not the case today these tools allow people to scan documents and discover so grant agencies journals and your professors are scanning your documents to see if you have engaged in plagiarism
09:00 - 09:30 okay so it becomes essential that you protect yourself and utilize the tools that are given to you to make sure to ensure that you do not plagiarize so if you were to google something like plagiarism and university president you would find that there's quite a list of university presidents that have been found guilty of plagiarism okay does this mean that all university presidents are bad and evil no it doesn't
09:30 - 10:00 what it means is that they have a job when you at that level of administration you have a job that sometimes makes people angry people get mad at you and one of the things that happens when people get angry at you is they try to hold you accountable or possibly damage your career so university president makes faculty member angry the faculty goes and downloads their entire publishing history and run it through i authenticate you can do it probably in an afternoon doesn't even take a lot of time
10:00 - 10:30 and they find evidence of plagiarism and then they go very very public to damage the reputation of somebody that made them angry so this is happening in academics all right and it's not just people scanning the work of university presidents they will do it to each other when they're competitors or enemies okay this is happening it's what i call the plagiarism witch hunt which isn't really an appropriate term for it it's just how i use it in my mind but
10:30 - 11:00 basically there's people that honorably scan the literature because they're trying to improve their discipline and then there's probably there there are people that are using these systems as a vendetta okay now we have authenticate and if you've ever looked at the website for authenticate it says this is to be utilized for scanning your own work only all right but somebody has a user account they can pretty much do what they want i really restrict students
11:00 - 11:30 actually graduate students can have user accounts undergraduates can't if i catch graduate students scanning other people's work i will take away their accounts faculty i do not okay so they can use this once they have access to it and i really can't control that like i said i do with graduate students also because they i've had cases where the students are scanning documents for everybody they know and using our software for people that
11:30 - 12:00 have nothing to do with texas tech which isn't allowed so i've run into those cases as well anyway more to the point is that somebody may scan your work to assess whether you have plagiarized so it's very important that you scan it before you ever submit for a class for publication for sure for a senior thesis for sure all right and make an assessment before you're not in trouble for scanning you get in trouble for submitting it so you
12:00 - 12:30 want to do the scan beforehand so that you can make your corrections so technology in a sense has caught up with the problem but by doing so it has created greater accountability and scrutiny for your generation of researchers all right all right so what we have now is not a world of i didn't mean to do it we have a world of you have to ensure that you do not purposefully or
12:30 - 13:00 accidentally plagiarize okay so why does plagiarism happen historically it was easy to do and hard to get caught it is not hard to get caught anymore it's easier than ever to do though you go to a website copy paste into a document boom you've now lifted words okay now you haven't really plagiarized if it's just for your own use but once you submit them as your own words to somebody else now you've plagiarized so
13:00 - 13:30 it's easier than ever but it's not hard to get caught we already talked about that all right um pressure and deadlines that's one of the other excuses the nsf report national science foundation report i mentioned one of the other excuses was i was rushing to meet a deadline okay doing work in the last minute so pressure causes us to make bad choices or forget that we meant to edit that text so the procrastinators out there um procrastination can make you rush and
13:30 - 14:00 you'll forget to edit text that you had intended to alter before you submitted for a class assignment or for publication so procrastination maps onto this have i haven't done the procrastination talk yet have i think that one's still coming up but i do a presentation on how to overcome and avoid procrastination plagiarism can be accidental if it's an accident did you still
14:00 - 14:30 plagiarize yeah remember you have to ensure that you don't you have the tools to do that all right so how can accidental plagiarism happen for those who may not have heard me talk about this before well basically like i just described you're reading websites you're coming across information you copy text you paste it into your notes because this website has a great description and later on when you come back to those
14:30 - 15:00 words if you did not put those words in quotation marks if you did not put a citation next to it you'll assume that those are your words they're in your notebook right so of course they're mine if you use those words then you've plagiarized it may have been an accident but you're still accountable for it cultural differences there's cultural differences in both the perceived severity of the offense there are cultures that do not think
15:00 - 15:30 plagiarism is a big deal all right that is not this culture all right so if again if anybody has ever told you plagiarism is not a big deal please listen to me now and not to them it is a huge concern we're going to talk about why in just a moment all right but there's also cultural differences in educational backgrounds or educational standards that increase the probability you will accidentally plagiarize okay if you were trained in a culture where the standard was to memorize words and
15:30 - 16:00 recite them back the right answer to the test was always the words that the professor used or the words that were in the textbook and your job was to memorize and recite it will increase the probability that you'll accidentally plagiarize because you have a long history of memorization and recitation as opposed to how i was trained put it in your own words okay if you weren't trained in a background of putting things in your own words translating them to your own type
16:00 - 16:30 of language there's a possibility you are accidentally plagiarized okay so there's cultural differences but i really think the biggest actually before i get to that i also think that there's sometimes confusion on how to cite or when to cite okay how the site is disciplinary specific different disciplines site in different ways when the site is easy when do you cite one word
16:30 - 17:00 assad always always if you're using somebody's ideas you're using somebody else's words you cite if you're using somebody else's words you put them in quotation marks and cite you pay for words with quotation marks and a citation you pay for ideas with a citation okay because that's what you're doing when you're citing your pain to use the ideas of others okay but i really think the primary reason that people plagiarize is writing is hard
17:00 - 17:30 writing is one of the most difficult things that academics do so who i have any natural writers in here got one anybody else it's actually kind of interesting because when i asked that of undergraduates i'll always have one or two people raise their hand and they're probably very good writers there is no doubt it's actually kind of funny when i present when i ask that question of graduate students or faculty nobody raises their hands all right and i think it's because they
17:30 - 18:00 realize that it is the hardest thing that we do because you're you're taking very complex phenomenon and trying to convey them in a language to often a non-expert it's incredibly difficult thing to do all right and i think as people struggle to write they go back to well how did they say it and once you read those words of how the other person said it you're like that's so well written you can't get it out of
18:00 - 18:30 your head and that increases the probability that you will accidentally plagiarize so i think the fact that writing is so difficult so the struggle to write is not just one for students the struggle to write is something that all academics struggle with all right even writers i have a good friend who works at the graduate writing center and so she teaches writing to graduate students and and i'd talk to her i said well it's
18:30 - 19:00 probably easy for you she goes no you'd be surprised so somebody whose entire career is involved in writing she struggles with it with with it as well so writing is really difficult because what i want you to realize is that writing is not simply putting words on paper writing is mastery of information at a level that nothing else well the only thing that really maps on to writing would be teaching trying to convey something to a group of
19:00 - 19:30 non-experts when you have these incredible complex phenomenon scenarios that you're trying to convey you have to have such a working and flexible knowledge about things to be able to do that writing is the same way you're developing a mastery so what you're really engaged in when when you write is high level intellectual activity the highest level okay which is incredibly difficult it's much more fun to run around the lab and run
19:30 - 20:00 experiments and run through procedures it's even fun to process data there's a lot of routine to it you can listen to music and writing requires all of your focus so it is incredibly incredibly difficult it's also why your professors i'm going to let you know assign papers it's not to torture you they almost always assign papers over information they want you to master because if you haven't realized it yet you will soon the information where you've written
20:00 - 20:30 papers for classes you will never forget that will stay with you for the rest of your life you will continue to understand that phenomena because you mastered it at such a high intellectual level those multiple choice scantron tests you're going to go through your notes in a few years and go like i actually knew that i can't believe i knew that i have no recollection of ever learning that whatsoever but if you wrote a paper on it
20:30 - 21:00 you will never forget it it will stay with you forever so it's a really high level of intellectual activity what we're talking about is mastery of a discipline or mastery of information okay so it's also why it's so offensive when people try to bypass the struggle to write okay if you have colleagues that take shortcuts hire ghostwriters to do their writing for them
21:00 - 21:30 that's a very offensive thing to do in academics because they're not doing their job as scholars as scholars we're supposed to want to master information if your colleagues aren't engaged in that battle to master information they're not doing their job all right i mean as much as we struggle against not wanting to write we actually signed on for careers where
21:30 - 22:00 that's part of our responsibility and here's the funniest part once you've struggled through the words and written it and it's really well written you kind of strut it makes you proud all right it's the struggle that's so hard so hard to start to engage in the struggle but the success of it is what makes somebody a scholar is what makes somebody an intellectual all right and when people bypass it when they try to skip that step by hiring somebody to do it for them that is offensive to us because they're not mastering the
22:00 - 22:30 information they're letting somebody else do it for them okay so that's where the honor in academics comes we have expectations that people are sweating the work they're sweating the research they're sweating the writing so everybody in here you're all on a path to pursue some area of academic
22:30 - 23:00 scholarship research okay i don't know necessarily what your path is and you're probably still at this point in your career deciding exactly what that path is you're tr some of you who are doing research rotations you're trying things on but you might know you might not know all right but what you did learn at some point you sat in a classroom maybe it was as a high school student maybe it was as a undergraduate new new undergraduate student and you
23:00 - 23:30 heard about a discovery or a technology and it kind of blew you away and you got excited about it and you realize that you have the ability to contribute at that level a scholarly career whether it's in medicine whether it's in science whether it's in uh humanities it's a contribution it's a high level contribution all right
23:30 - 24:00 doesn't mean it's easy but it's very worthy and people who make that decision they make a different type of decision about what is a successful career their idea of a success successful career is one of contribution yes of course we all want to pay our bills that's that's that's enough course when you know nobody wants to be poor and broke but it's not simply a monetary decision it's a decision of contribution you all have friends that are working on
24:00 - 24:30 business degrees and when they get their bachelor's degree they're going into the business world and many of you will go on for an advanced degree in your in your discipline and your friends are like why why are you doing that you could be working and making a lot of money the reason that you're doing it is that you're like yeah i want to earn a living but i want to contribute at a higher level and that's that it's kind of like this very honorable thing to do and that's one of the reasons that you're choosing to do it
24:30 - 25:00 but you have to realize it's not an easy path it's not it's very worthy and it's it's it's very valuable but it's not necessarily easy all right as such when you're when you're pursuing this you have to be wary of pressure pressure causes you to take shortcuts procrastinate things like that so you have to address pressure but the other thing that you have to do is when you're pressured when you're worried when you're sweating about your scientific
25:00 - 25:30 ideas academic ideas when you're worried and you're sweating about the words that you're writing and the criticism that you might face that's not a bad thing it's actually a good thing it means that you're engaged in your scholarship you're concerned about it you you're very involved in it and it becomes yeah it is your career and i recommend that everybody develop a little separation between life and career but probably is part of your life more
25:30 - 26:00 than the standard work of others you're very vested in it all right and that's what scholars do they they absolutely embrace that type of sweat and worry while they're pursuing their best ideas all right so let's talk about where we first learned about plagiarism it was probably about fifth or sixth grade and your teacher started to talk about well you can use
26:00 - 26:30 four words four consecutive words from a source but not five five is plagiarism four is not so what they taught you and this is what i was taught as well they taught you to count words because and the reason i know that this still happens is i still get the question a lot of times well how many words can you use from a previous source before it's plagiarism so people were taught to count words counting words does not mean you're not plagiarizing counting words means you're
26:30 - 27:00 quantifying the magnitude of the events but either way it's an offense all right this is what's called mosaic plagiarism and a lot of students think it's perfectly acceptable that what i'll do is i'm going to count every four or five words and every time there's a key word i'm going to open up the word thesaurus and i'm going to replace it with another word and then i'm not plagiarizing that you are plagiarizing it's called mosaic plagiarism okay and plagiarism detection software
27:00 - 27:30 catches it because you'll see the document it will highlight the four words that came from another source and show you that the fifth word was replaced so it's really obvious and and these systems are getting better and better and better at detecting that type of behavior all right which means it's easier and easier to catch mosaic plagiarism when they first came out with authenticate when i first started working with it in like 2011 it wasn't that good at catching this it's really good now you clearly can see
27:30 - 28:00 the pattern when you run a scan okay so replacing only keywords does not mean you're not plagiarizing so whatever you're a fifth grade teacher if anybody was taught to count words stop counting words and learn how to paraphrase a paraphrase is not replacing key words a paraphrase is taking something somebody else wrote combining it with your own thoughts
28:00 - 28:30 and creating something brand new and yes it's hard and you have no idea how often how often i get the question of well if somebody else wrote it so well i should just be able to use that and i get this from graduate students no that's theirs if i want to read their work i'll read their work you have to contribute something new for me to be interested in reading what you wrote so a paraphrase like i said it's not easy it's not supposed to be easy
28:30 - 29:00 it's about engaging in intellectual work all right we're going to talk about self-plagiarism in just a moment but mosaic plagiarism just so you know replacing key words does not protect you so self-plagiarism so everybody focuses on the theft of words and ideas which is the first part of the definition of plagiarism the second part of the definition is to present something as new and original when you know
29:00 - 29:30 it's derived from an existing source all right what what does this mean if you in undergraduate terms if you write a paper for this class and then a year later you're taking another class and the topic is relatable to the new class i'll just recycle my paper so you're presenting something as new and original to your professor when you know you submitted it for this other class that's the standard undergraduate model
29:30 - 30:00 um in the professional world it would be related to do you got to go oh i thought you were trying to give me okay in the professional world it would be publishing in one journal and then publishing the work again in a different journal or submitting an idea to this grant agency and then without modifying the document at all i'll submit it over here too because if i submit it to two agencies i'm more likely to get funded that is
30:00 - 30:30 self-plagiarism it's not allowed all right so there's a lot of models where this happens all right but basically what we're talking about is deception you're telling your audience hey this is new and original when in fact you know there's nothing original about it so we have theft and we have deception all right so why does all of this matter so much i often hear the excuse of well there really is no original work we're all
30:30 - 31:00 standing on the shoulders of giants that's true and it's not true let's break that up there is no original work is that true no of course there's original work we're making breakthroughs in research science humanities every day there's new creation there's new artwork we're seeing it all the time probably in greater number in in greater quantity than ever before with internet and such
31:00 - 31:30 when you peruse this stuff it's happening so fast it's of course there's original work are we all standing on the shoulders of giants absolutely absolutely they laid the groundwork for us doesn't matter what your discipline is there are giants and they laid the groundwork and we get to use what they created to take the next step so there's truth and there's false to this and in fact what i want you to realize it is only by giving credit to the giants or even
31:30 - 32:00 your contemporary colleagues that you reveal your new thinking you have to say this is what they did but this is mine this is what i think you only reveal your thoughts your originality by giving them credit for what they contributed all right so you have to do it but the other reason is you build an academic career yes you teach and i'm not just i'm not
32:00 - 32:30 discounting teaching for your professors it's very important but as far as their uh their scholarly career you build it through publication and through citation publishing gets your words and ideas out there so that other people can read them all right so it builds a very public career persona of your abilities your thoughts your ingenuity your insights your creativity
32:30 - 33:00 all right publishing gets it out there citation is a measure of impact citation means that your colleagues looked at your work and they said this is useful and they cite you you're making an impact on your field they're using your ideas that's the measure of impact and that's what citation is it's why it's so important all right and here's the other thing that i think is really interesting a lot of times when you have incidents
33:00 - 33:30 of self-plagiarism i don't understand why people don't cite themselves of course you're building off your previous ideas why wouldn't you cite yourself it helps your career all right so i often find that very astonishing when there's a self-plagiarism allegation because they didn't cite themselves i really can't get my head around it other than the fact that maybe they don't understand that these two pieces engage together to build research
33:30 - 34:00 careers all right so it's very important when you use other people's ideas or words that you give them credit through citation you're helping to build their career they're going to be very happy that you did that they're going to be very happy that you they that you use their work and that you cited them because it builds their career all right now if you're not publishing yet and you're not at that level with you guys a lot of this is citation during your coursework all right so why is it so important
34:00 - 34:30 to cite for your coursework any thoughts because you guys are in training you are our future scholars all right and what you'll find has anybody ever been in a class where your your professor's talking about something and he's like oh and he he kind of goes off on tangent happens to me all the time and and there they go there was this group that did this work
34:30 - 35:00 uh related to this i can't remember their name what he's struggling to do it's so ingrained in academics to give credit that even while teaching they're trying to remember who they should be giving credit to and that's how automatic we want it in our students in our futures when you know you're talking about the work of others we want to make sure that you're trying to give them credit all right and i remember my professors doing this all the
35:00 - 35:30 time all right so once again once again this is the theme of the day when should you cite always so if your professor assigns you gives you an assignment and does not tell you that you have to cite do you still cite yes they don't have to tell you it doesn't have to be in their syllabus it's in the student code of conduct that plagiarism is scholarly misconduct just so you know there's there's this overreaching umbrella of rules
35:30 - 36:00 okay and the other thing that i want you to know as your careers evolve and i kind of said this already but i'm going to say it again is because you have technology that i did not have your career you in your career you're going to face greater scrutiny so for example those university presidents that i talked about when they started publishing eons ago none of this technology existed and a lot of times what they're finding in these scans
36:00 - 36:30 is work that was published long before there was plagiarism detection software or what they find is it's it's part of a speech they've given a speech somewhere and they utilized somebody else's words and quoted them but they didn't give them credit during the speech what happens when you're at that type of level is a lot of times when you give speeches people transcribe the speeches into written works it wasn't what they were meant to do but it's standard so it gets really tricky when you give a speech and using somebody else's words
36:30 - 37:00 or ideas how do you cite without losing momentum of a speech all right so a lot of times that's what's being found all right but also they didn't have this technology so again if they've lifted whole chapters of books for their publication they should be held accountable for it but there's a little more forgiveness because they didn't have this for some of the you know short snippets of
37:00 - 37:30 words all right you guys are not going to have the same level of forgiveness as your careers evolve because the technology exists right now you have to lay a foundation or a standard of good practice so that you don't face those types of allegations so it's really important that you do this as soon as you start publishing like i said senior thesis if you're working with a mentor then when you publish with them make sure run the skins a lot of your really senior professors
37:30 - 38:00 they might not keep up with technology they don't really know that this stuff exists and telling them hey we can run a scan to make sure that there's no problems with this text but here's the thing even if they say no no no don't worry about it if your name is on that manuscript scan it anyway okay because yes their career is on the line but they're going to retire you're just starting out all right so if your name if you're an
38:00 - 38:30 author on a manuscript on a document protect yourself get it scanned okay even if they're not so if they're planning to retire in two years and you're working with somebody with that level of experience because it's very valuable just protect your own reputation okay all right i kind of talked about this i didn't do it somebody else did it was my student it was my colleague it was my collaborator it wasn't me all right how do you protect yourself
38:30 - 39:00 from this type of allegation number one like i said have the document scanned even if it was somebody if you're an author on it at all you want you want to make sure there's not plagiarized text in there so scan the document to make sure there's no plagiarism the other thing is keep paper trails of who did what who wrote what so as a manuscript is being passed back and forth and people are making changes
39:00 - 39:30 keep track of what you wrote and what they wrote all right and this is not really necessarily pertinent for your mentors now okay because your contribution as undergraduates sometimes it's it's it's pretty involved i'm often impressed with what undergraduates do as compared to what i did when i was an undergraduate but a lot of times you're not contributing a great deal to the written work you might have done the first draft and then they alter it massively which happened to me when i was an undergrad
39:30 - 40:00 but keep track of who wrote what what you're going to find out later in your career is you're going to have collaborators they could be other people in your department they could be people at other universities and they're going to write part of the manuscript and you're going to write part of the manuscript so number one you're going to scan that manuscript but the other thing i want you to keep track of who wrote what now let's talk about i'm going to qualify that that's kind of protecting you from the allegation of i didn't do
40:00 - 40:30 it they did it but the reason the scan is so important as the last step before submission is if your name is on the manuscript if you are an author you are accountable for everything in that manuscript okay which means if your colleagues do bad things your name is on there it's going to impact your career as well that's the standard that's the expectation that's the standard that's
40:30 - 41:00 set in scholarship so that people don't simply say i didn't do it they did it so when it's a senior scientist saying i didn't do it it was my student who did it i don't think that's an excuse at all you mean to tell me you're not checking the work of your students you're supposed to be training your students so i don't really accept that and a lot of people in academics don't accept that type of excuse either all right so if you're if you're an author on a manuscript you are accountable for what's in it but these
41:00 - 41:30 are two ways to protect yourself the biggest one is scan the documents so let's talk about avoiding it at all for yourself number one writing we talked about the struggle to write it's real we also talked a little bit about procrastination and putting things off to the last minute if you're going to pursue a career in any area of scholarship it's kind of important right now to develop a routine to write regularly
41:30 - 42:00 all right or study in your case depending on what your demands are so don't wait like i used to to night before the exam to cram everything in or the weekend before the paper is due i'm writing like crazy schedule time to write every day start to create a routine the fact of the matter is if you police a routine you'll do it automatically who has a who's a bedtime routine anybody have a bedtime routine i do okay reaches a certain time in the
42:00 - 42:30 evening i gotta go brush my teeth and i got to do this got to let the dogs out and you have a routine that you do engage and i don't think about doing it i just start to get a little tired and that i fall into my routine all right routines almost everybody has some type of routine in their life the writing routine is a great thing to get into as a scholar because it will drive your productivity the routine will drive your productivity so if you're most alert in the morning schedule time every morning to read to
42:30 - 43:00 write to study and during that time don't peruse facebook don't peruse your email don't get on the phone with friends you absolutely police it you engage in that at that time if you're an evening person you schedule it in the evening and honor it the same way you would honor a meeting with your advisor or your mentor or your boss you wouldn't blow off a meeting with your boss so you don't blow off your time that you scheduled to write and if you do this
43:00 - 43:30 every day it will eventually become automatic and as your careers evolve it will serve to make you more productive okay use notebooks while reading and writing to record your thoughts okay and when you record your thoughts do what i call i i think i i go i call it reaction or brain farts when you read something that's interesting just write it as quickly as possible don't worry about grammar as long as it's in a language that you can
43:30 - 44:00 understand all right and just get it out on paper just you can clean it up later on all right but if you get those thoughts out really quickly without resist the urge to look how they said it resist the urge to copy paste you're getting that into a format that you can utilize to edit okay now here's the other interesting thing is if you do this regularly when you're writing a paper you read a little something and you spit out a paragraph and you read a
44:00 - 44:30 little something and you spit out a paragraph what actually is happening is your assignment or your paper is coming together and you don't even realize it you're getting the bones down all right remember to put those citations in there i'm reacting to this chapter i'm reacting to this paper i'm reacting to okay and you have papers kind of coming together and as you organize those thoughts every time you read something that's roughly related you see it all lining up
44:30 - 45:00 it's not that difficult you'll actually struggle more with the editing than the the spit how i like to put it okay so reaction paragraphs plan ahead don't procrastinate of course scan your documents turn it in authenticate then there's the whose idea was that um you're going to see this increasingly when you get more and more involved in your uh research groups your scholarly groups your you're going to sit in meetings or
45:00 - 45:30 you're going to read a manuscript and you're going to get this you're going to be driving home and you're going to have this aha moment this this light bulb moment where you have the best idea ever and it very well could be pure insight but more likely and you'll learn this eventually it's not insulting you that i've dealt with this myself i'd be driving home from the lab after reading a bunch of the literature and i get this great research idea because that's where i used to i live grew up in michigan so i'd be driving
45:30 - 46:00 home in michigan so if my commute was at least 30 minutes if not 45 save all this time to think in traffic and come up with this great idea what i learned eventually is that the idea came from somewhere what was happening while i was driving is my brain was kind of consolidating different ideas different thoughts what i had read the day and i'd get this aha moment really what it was as i finally understood something that was discussed that day so when you get that aha moment that light bulb it could be a very good idea all right
46:00 - 46:30 but find out where it came from because it probably came from some contributions remember we're using we're working we're building our work off of the ideas of others so figure out where those ideas came from because they came from somewhere there is probably pure insight occasionally it's extraordinarily rare a lot of times this comes from somewhere all right so these guys are my giants
46:30 - 47:00 all right so that is bf skinner in the glasses and that beard there that is ivan pavlov and the guy down at the bottom there is jim woods so sometimes the audience matters who you're presenting the work to so do you guys know who ivan pavlov and b.f skinner are no b.f skinner is the guy who uh defined positive reinforcement negative reinforcement punishment anybody had a
47:00 - 47:30 psych 101 class they cover b.f skinner he's the father of behaviorism ivan pavlov is pavlov's dog the bell that made the dog salivate anybody familiar with this okay so i see some nods if you had a psych 101 class you've covered these guys okay so a lot of times when i present this people have they've heard the name pavlov's dog they have an idea what it is so they actually defined some of the basic parameters of behavioral research long long time ago
47:30 - 48:00 jim woods is basically my academic grandfather he was my mentor's mentor so jim woods in the modern world contemporary world basically if there is a drug that affects thoughts and behavior psychoactive compounds he has studied it he's a profoundly prolific researcher profoundly this is my academic grandfather okay
48:00 - 48:30 now the reason i like to point these out everything that i have ever studied has built been built off of the work of these guys okay and i've published so who thinks that i have cited jim woods in my publications yes absolutely absolutely who thinks that i have cited b.f skinner or ivan pavlov who would be shocked to hear
48:30 - 49:00 no i have not no i have not and the reason is that when i publish the audience that i'm publishing for are all familiar with behaviorism there is absolutely no way anybody would attribute positive and negative reinforcement or classical conditioning to me they know who did it all right but they might not know the work that
49:00 - 49:30 jim woods did so there's an expectation here there is a if your audience could perceive that the work is yours when it is not you have to cite them and the reason that that there's this kind of limitation is that with the generations generations generations generations of research you would have the citation list would be enormous okay
49:30 - 50:00 however if the if the work could never be attributed to you by your target audience you might not have to cite them does that make sense all right if anybody could attribute the idea to you so the audience matters so if i was talking about my work to you behavioral research should i tell you about bf skinner and ivan pavlov yes i have to let you know that that
50:00 - 50:30 ingenuity is not mine but my professional colleagues who do the same type of work as me i don't have to tell them that bf skinner defined the parameters of positive and negative reinforcement they know that some of them knew it before me so there is an aspect of who is your audience so with regard to you as undergraduates everything that you write for your class
50:30 - 51:00 oops would you cite everybody's work that you utilize yes yes absolutely because one you're in training becomes your responsibility to understand where it came from by citing it you're learning it you're mastering that history all right but also you're going to be held accountable for it by your professors but what you're going to find when you step up in your career there's going to be things that you write about in general terms that you're not
51:00 - 51:30 necessarily citing the originators the founders of an entire area of research we haven't forgotten them never will but nobody's going to attribute their discoveries to us okay and the reason i tell students this and probably some of your professors that don't tell them that the reason i tell you this is that you're going to be reading manuscripts that are written by other people and you're going to see this you're going to say oh my god they're using positive reinforcement and they don't
51:30 - 52:00 cite the founder bf skinner well of course they don't all right so there's not necessary there's no misconduct there it's such a part of the culture that everybody knows okay so there's a consideration of the audience if the work can be interpreted as your original idea by the audience and you lead the audience to believe that it was your original idea that would be plagiarism but if there's
52:00 - 52:30 no way that it could be perceived to be then it's not okay so i'm going to stop there