What the right’s ‘plagiarism war’ really tells us about academic writing

Shortly before losing his re-election campaign in late June, the New York congressman Jamaal Bowman was accused of plagiarism. These charges were both similar to and different from other recent attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)-inflected research, which kicked off with the plagiarism allegations that forced Claudine Gay to resign as Harvard University president in January.

Unlike Gay, Bowman has never been an academic; his doctorate in education (an EdD) relates to his time as a high school educator. But he is, like Gay, black. As a self-described “socialist” and member of “The Squad” – the high-profile group of young leftist Democrats whose number includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – he was also an obvious target in the right’s plagiarism war that has sought to not only take down individuals but also delegitimise universities and expert knowledge.

Indeed, while The Daily Wire promised to focus on Bowman’s alleged plagiarism, the exposé centred more on his research subject: a study of community schools and how they address historic oppression. The piece’s authors targeted Bowman’s interview-based “‘qualitative’ research”. The scare quotes around “qualitative” signalled deep scepticism, bolstered by a subsequent critique that Bowman’s “statistical work” is “limited”. The accusatory article concluded that his “paper provides little in the way of meaningful advances in scholarship” and is emblematic of “the dismal pseudo-scholarship that drives much of education”.

As the Plagiarism Watch website observed, Bowman’s thesis, like Gay’s work, does contain plagiarism, but his offence is considered “mild”. Such minor forms of plagiarism are viewed as “sloppy writing” rather than as “deliberate academic fraud”, which may seem reassuring. But how do we understand these instances of “unintentional” plagiarism?

Higher education has barely responded to what seems to be a true problem. The “sloppiness” argument relies on an assumption that scholars across disciplines “copy and paste” passages from others’ books and articles. In that process, they might forget an attribution or confuse a passage copied verbatim for a paraphrase. But the “we all do it” responses to plagiarism accusations are, as observed in Tyler Austin Harper’s piece in The Atlantic, both disingenuous and patently false.

The persistence of the “we all do it” plagiarism defence is perplexing. Could “we all do it” be code for “we are all susceptible to it” in the accelerated “publish or perish” landscape of research universities? If so, practices and habits of scholarship need to be revisited as technologies make it easier for amateur sleuths to become whistleblowers. However overblown the allegations against Bowman may be, they highlight a crucial missing piece in the plagiarism conversation: methodology.

The connection between method and source use deserves closer examination. Before the 21st century, scholars took notes on paper, summarising or paraphrasing as they read. Some few may still operate this way, but most writers now take notes by copying and pasting relevant information and passages from articles and books – either directly into their writing-in-process or into another document or citation manager. This is where problems may begin.

“Copy and paste” makes note-taking efficient, but it also makes us vulnerable: it’s easy to forget to include the source of a copied passage or get distracted and lose track of which pasted idea came from where, whether a passage has already been paraphrased or not, and so on. (How many windows/articles do you have open at once?) And if all you do is swap out a few words to “paraphrase”, that’s still plagiarism, even with a citation.

The “minor” plagiarism Bowman and others have practised involves phrases from published work lifted with citation but without summary or paraphrase. In other words, the phrases or passages should be direct quotations, or they should be rephrased substantially to pass as summary or paraphrase. Teachers of writing often recommend not copying and pasting from other sources for this reason – and instead, taking notes by summarising (condensing a passage in your own words) or paraphrasing (translating a passage into your own words and sentence structure) up front. But this process is time-consuming, especially before you know whether you will even be citing a specific passage.

Let’s face it – three decades of word processing and digital scholarship have fundamentally altered the practices of managing sources and producing scholarship. With additional factors – time, funding, space, access to tools and resources and so on – constraining research, many search for shortcuts. Applied to the processing of others’ ideas and findings, these “efficiencies” foster plagiarism.

While teaching in the Princeton University Writing Program for nearly a decade, I watched the hazards of “copy”/“paste” unfold among students and colleagues, and I started tracking sources and notes differently: in a spreadsheet, with columns for the “source title”, “source material”, “page or link”, “source function” and “source representation (direct quote, paraphrase, or summary)”. I offer this process not as a model but as recognition that source work is methodological.

Now, as director of the Scholarly Writing Program at Indiana University, I have the privilege of talking daily with faculty about their writing and research processes. Recently, a well-established scholar asked a group of colleagues how they track sources, take notes and manage ideas. This scholar had done this work “by memory” for several decades but now felt overloaded and in need of a system. Several mid-career faculty shared note-taking practices involving multiple Word documents or Scrivener. One suggested a spreadsheet. A few referenced Zotero, Endnote or Mendeley. Some are trying Citavi. Everyone expressed frustrations with the limitations and clunkiness of their respective systems – and we marvelled at the varied practices for doing the same thing: managing sources.

But are other fundamental challenges also driving plagiarism controversies? Scholarly source work is now facilitated by software and technologies that change rapidly, which makes for diverse practices within and across fields. Although scholars agree about the importance of citing sources, questions abound about how/where that should happen. Are direct quotations accepted in the field? Can you add a citation in the middle of a sentence? If a sentence offers some of your own ideas while citing one or more sources, how do the citations and sentence structure signal the distinction? (Spoiler: often, they do not.) The plagiarism problem is multi-layered and raises questions about writing technologies, the digitisation of scholarship, the circulation of digital information, reading and research practices, disciplinary norms and practices, and more.

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In another recent case involving a Harvard Medical School professor, Dipek Panigrahy was accused of plagiarising in “an expert [legal] report on possibly carcinogenic chemicals”. The report is caught in the cross hairs of different source-use expectations and audiences: the medical, scientific community of Panigrahy’s training and the legal context he addressed. You need not spend much time with medical and legal journals to recognise that they look different, use sources differently and follow distinct (not to say incompatible) citation practices.

These “style” differences reflect specific methods, aims and relationships to knowledge production. These norms and practices around source use, and other discipline-specific practices, are often indecipherable to those outside these specialised academic communities. Meanwhile, digital and open-access scholarship has made the specialised practices of scholarly writing more widely available to non-specialists – a situation that makes for a perfect storm.

Discipline- and publication-specific priorities also contribute to these dynamics. Journals and presses push for brevity, often including bibliographic information in word count limits. Some encourage minimising bibliographic information. These moves disincentivise responsible source use and contribute to rote citation practices that provide little or no context about the sources cited – and the specific ideas, data, results, models or methods referenced.

When I work with undergraduates who ask which citation style they should use, I invite them to determine whether their work best coheres with the most common “styles”: those of the AMA (American Medical Association), APA (American Psychological Association), ISSE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers), MLA (Modern Language Association), Chicago or CSE (Council of Science Editors). Those weeks-long conversations involve some of the following questions: What conventions do most of your sources use? What functions do your sources serve? How do your sources further argumentative aims?

Students choose AMA, ISSE and CSE when most of their sources use those styles, or they expect to go into a medical, engineering or science field. These students often confront important additional questions: What do I do if I want to use this phrase from a source, but quotation isn’t typical of the style I’m working in? How can I paraphrase certain parts of the methods or results when the goal is reproducibility? How many different ways are there to say X, Y, Z? Style guides offer no clear-cut answers to these questions.

So, I tell my students to figure out what best serves their paper’s objectives and adapt their style to it. If you truly can’t paraphrase something, quote it. If the style you’re working in doesn’t “do” quotation, look at other styles and adapt, using your sources responsibly and working within the parameters of the chosen citation format. Have most scholars had these conversations or sat with these tensions?

For many, the fact that publishers determine style is the beginning and end of the conversation about source use and citation. But these styles shape – if not condition – scholarly practices. Respected scholars have shared that they do not believe they can make any choices regarding style. This position turns source use and citation into rote practices.

They are not. What appears in print is a function of an analytical process that is an unacknowledged method of scholarship, mediated through search engines, library databases, Google Scholar, other scholarship, conversations and an ever-expanding digital landscape of apps and platforms. These tools range from the “writing”-oriented – Word, LaTex, Scrivener, GoogleDocs and so on – to citation/source management systems – Endnote, Zotero, Mendeley, Citavi, Powernotes, etc – to project management platforms – Canva, Trello and so on.

While all potentially helpful, they also contribute to confusion. The research, reading and analysis scholars perform with existing literature is an assumed method of academic research – often only visible when plagiarism or source misuse emerges. Maybe this is because all scholars do this work, but few are explicitly taught how. My sense is that most of us cobbled together a process using tools and technologies that were the norm when we were in college and graduate school. “Upgrades” happen when problems arise, or we happen upon other approaches.

In my research-based writing classes, students’ first papers have often included “methods” sections detailing the databases they have used for research, the key terms they searched and, in some cases, even how they went about selecting quotes. I have never asked for these details, and when this section appears, I struggle to explain that although this work is part of their research process, it is not conventionally written up.

Students are perplexed. Why do they have to elaborate how they collect data but not how they collect evidence about existing knowledge? Why is the reproducibility of one form of research more important than another?

Ironically, perhaps, disciplines that value the reproducibility of findings and methods often do not allow direct quotation and operate in citation styles that discourage contextualising other scholarship. They centre “data”. Inversely, arts and humanities disciplines that centre texts and other sources tend to operate in citation styles that cultivate readers’ ability to trace if not reproduce a writer’s archive/library. Cross-disciplinary scholars and mixed methods researchers are most likely to be conversant in both style spectra.

Plagiarism is an age-old concern, but the recent cases highlight the roles of community “outsiders” in calling out problematic practices. This dynamic highlights the reality that because research is evaluated by experts, scholars primarily seek out expert readers. Expert readers are important, but their experience and expertise allow them to fill in missing information or gloss over assumptions. We do not all plagiarise, but we do all inhabit reading and writing landscapes conditioned by cultures and communities of expertise – and there is much we take for granted as readers. Often, it is only when we encounter “outside” genres, conventions and styles that our own methods and practices become visible.

Every profession has its versions of professional mistakes: restaurants are inspected for sanitary purposes and contamination of surfaces (but even those inspections don’t prevent all food poisoning); hospitals and medical offices, which also follow sanitation protocols, are well known for being sites of contamination. The “minor” forms of plagiarism Bowman, Gay and others have perpetuated are more reasonably viewed as a research version of incidental – and accidental – contamination. They are hazards of research materials and environments, but there are methods to guard against them.

This recognition does not make plagiarism acceptable or desirable, however, and ignoring legitimate instances of plagiarism – regardless of intent – is not helpful. Scholars, teachers and universities must attend to how, when and why researchers engage with sources. The right’s plagiarism war raises important, unacknowledged methodological questions. The diversity of sources, methods, publication venues, technologies and citation formats is a threat to scholarly practice.

The emergence of generative AI further complicates the issues by inaugurating a “new” landscape in which writing is a form of recycling and recompiling text. But this technological transition highlights the reality that we have engaged in such recycling and recompiling for decades through the digitisation of scholarship, the steady expansion of digital writing tools and the profound changes these “tools” bring to knowledge production.

Genevieve Creedon is director of Indiana University’s Scholarly Writing Program.