“Is Imitation the Sincerest Form of Flattery? Not Without Proper Attribution.”

We’re going to get a little meta here, so be warned.

Take a look at the headline of this post. For those of you unfamiliar with the symbols to the left and right of the words, those are quotation marks. What that means is that we’ve taken those two sentences from another source. And here is that other source, a blog post from Tahseen Consulting titled — yes, you guessed it, “Is Imitation the Sincerest Form of Flattery? Not Without Proper Attribution.”

Apparently, the last group of authors who liked Tahseen’s words enough to use them did so without that whole attribution thing. Here, let us demonstrate attribution again, this time using the WordPress block-quote function. From the post:

Occasionally we publish articles that are so compelling that others “borrow” word-for-word from our work without proper citation or attribution. This was the case with a recent article that appeared in a prominent academic journal that “borrowed” largely upon the findings of Tahseen Consulting’s research on knowledge economy transitions in the Arab World but failed to acknowledge our work. The article, which can be viewed here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rsp3.12034/abstract, has since been retracted.

Now, we will quote that retraction notice, for “Knowledge-based economy in Arab countries: between Silicon Valley and Phosphate Gully,” which appeared in Regional Science Policy & Practice:

The above article, published online on 24 February 2014 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the journal Editor-in-Chief, Professor Mike Carroll, the Regional Science Association International and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The retraction has been agreed due to overlap with text from “The Knowledge-Based Economy and the Failure of the Arab Dream: What the !#%@ Happened?” by Wesley Schwalje (Social Science Research Network, published on 24 May 2012).

Is there really anything to say beyond “What the !#%@ Happened?”

Not really, except to make sure you know that the question is copied from a paper by Wesley Schwalje.