Book comes out, and some of the marginal comments I offered appear word for word in the text. (Others are barely paraphrased.) I am thanked, but not in any individual notes (“Thanks to John S. for suggesting…”). I was one of thirty-eight individuals listed in the front acknowledgments as people with whom the author had “interesting conversations.”

Beyond personal pique–and yeah, there was some–it struck me as a kind of break in the academic social contract. If someone points you to a source, or if someone helps you formulate a particularly critical idea, well, then they do deserve specific mention. Proper attribution is important.

A summary of the biggest changes here: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/15/

And.. yes, I also worry about inadvertently ripping someone off. Some of my notes are not always as clear as they could be (and I’m working on improving my note-taking!) If I’m not sure what I have is a direct quote or a paraphrase, I paraphrase my notes and cite.

Turns out, it was a pretty poetic phrase, which is why Clifford Geertz wrote it in his Balinese cockfight essay so many years ago. I read the piece as an undergrad and once in graduate school and hadn’t re-read it since; one sentence had just stuck in my head, waiting to come out at an inopportune time. I only caught it when I was re-reading another secondary source invoking Geertz and this aphorism. (Tellingly, it was an allusion, without direct citation. I suppose we are all supposed to know “Notes on a Balinese Cockfight” without giving an exact reference?)

Needless to say, the line was quickly pulled from the book. The sometimes inartful prose in the book is all mine.

(I used one such reference in my thesis after I was unable to locate the original article and the authors ignored my request for a copy. After my thesis was published, I got a nasty e-mail from them taking me to task for not reading the original! But that’s another story for another day.)

There is a rather lengthy and detailed section in our pub manual explaining how to cite online sources. One does not thank Google, for example, but simply cites the web address and the date the information was downloaded–in the reference section, not in a footnote.

As for that “sloppy note-taking” excuse of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s, that might explain one, brief plagiarized passage but not numerous passages. Not to mention, I don’t buy for a minute that one could copy an entire paragraph onto a notecard, not put it in quotations on the notecard itself, and then not recognize later that it is not one’s own prose. Puh-leeze.

Unconscious plagiarism is more of a risk. I once said something I thought was so catchy on my practice website, only to be driving down the highway a few weeks later and see it on an ad for a local healthcare chain. Eek. I had driven by that sign for years, really liked the slogan, and regurgitated it on my website with absolutely no conscious awareness of its source.

There’s a whole literature in psychology on the subject: It happens all the time that we know something, but misremember how we know it or where we know it from. Didn’t make me feel any better. I removed that line from my ad as soon as I got back to the office, but I know people were bound to have seen it already, and it embarrasses me to this day.