Category: literature

“Totally crappy:” Library magazine adds quotes from vendor without authors’ consent

Screen Shot 2016-01-13 at 12.43.15 PMTwo librarians who wrote a feature story for the magazine American Libraries say that editors added quotes from an educational company without their consent.

The feature, “Special Report: Digital Humanities in Libraries,” was included in the Jan/Feb 2016 issue of the magazine, published by the American Libraries Association. It includes some data from a survey conducted by the ALA and Gale — a company that sells digital resources, such as a collection of British newspapers beginning in the 1600s. According to the survey, an “overwhelming 97% of libraries agree” that digital resources like those archives should be available in library collections.

The authors aren’t objecting to that statistic. What they are objecting to, they say, is the journal’s decision to include some general quotes from a Gale representative, without checking with them first. The authors — Stewart Varner, a Digital Scholarship Librarian at the University of North Carolina, and Patricia Hswe, who co-heads the department of Publishing and Curation Services at Penn State  —  say they first learned of the quotes when they got the magazine in the mail.

On his blog, Varner calls it a “totally crappy” situation, and explains “the article was edited after we thought we had turned in the final version:” Continue reading “Totally crappy:” Library magazine adds quotes from vendor without authors’ consent

Serial plagiarizer notches three retractions

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The chips are starting to fall from investigations into the works of Mustapha Marrouchi, a former English professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) — he’s lost three papers from the journal College Literature.

Things began publicly unraveling for Marrouchi last year when an investigation by the Chronicle of Higher Education found lifted material in his books, essays, and peer-reviewed papers. (It’s worth scanning the comparisons to text from Salman Rushdie, John Updike, and other authors.)

Meanwhile, an investigation by the UNLV found that 23 out of 26 of his papers published between 2008 and 2013 contained instances of plagiarism. He was later fired.

Now, the fallout continues, with the retraction of three works published in 2010 and 2011 in College Literature. All papers were for plagiarism uncovered as the result of a UNLV investigation (presumably, the same one).

The retracted papers are: Continue reading Serial plagiarizer notches three retractions

Serial plagiarist loses 13 papers

NeoheliconAccusations of plagiarism spanning at least 14 years have finally caught up with Richard Lawrence Etienne Barnett, who has had 13 papers retracted from a journal he had guest edited.

The dean of the for-profit University of Atlanta has been accused of copying his own and others’ work a number of times, as we wrote in November.

Here’s the notice from Neohelicon editor Péter Hajdu: Continue reading Serial plagiarist loses 13 papers

UNLV English professor fired for plagiarizing Updike, Said, Zizek, and more

via UNLV.
Mustapha Marrouchi, via UNLV

An English professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has been fired after the discovery that a huge portion of his work from the last two decades contains material lifted wholesale from some of the world’s best writers and thinkers.

Mustapha Marrouchi was first accused of plagiarism in 1992, when he ripped off an essay by W.J.T. Mitchell in the London Review of Books. Then in 1999, a letter by lecturer Stephen Howe appeared in the LRB, accusing Marrouchi of an “almost verbatim” theft of one of Howe’s book reviews: Continue reading UNLV English professor fired for plagiarizing Updike, Said, Zizek, and more

Tracking down lit crit plagiarism leads to “discourses of madness”

Screen Shot 2014-11-19 at 12.37.17 PMThis one brings together a bunch of our favorite topics, including plagiarism, poetry, and predatory publishers. Look, alliteration!

Richard Lawrence Etienne Barnett, who often publishes under the name R-L Etienne Barnett, has been accused of plagiarizing at least 18 articles by other scholars, mostly analyses of French poetry, as well as duplicating his own work at least eight times.

Most recently, French literary theorist Michel Charles published a dissection of Barnett’s history of plagiarism on lit crit site Fabula. Barnett had sent an article to Poétique, the poetry journal Charles edits. Charles quickly realized something was amiss (all quotes in this post were originally in French, and have been translated via Google): Continue reading Tracking down lit crit plagiarism leads to “discourses of madness”

Holocaust paper yanked for plagiarizing

ejesPro tip: If you’re going to write a paper on giving voice to hidden words, PLEASE try not to plagiarize!

Esther Sánchez-Pardo, of Complutense University in Madrid, was the author of a 2010 article in the European Journal of English Studies titled “Who will carry the word? The threshold between unspeakability and silence in the Holocaust narratives of Charlotte Delbo and Jorge Semprun.”

The problem, it turns out, is that a couple of other authors had their words carried, but Sánchez-Pardo didn’t bother to speak their names.

According to the abstract: Continue reading Holocaust paper yanked for plagiarizing