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November 30, 2007
copyright
Recently, I've been encountering many articles and training about copyright laws. I've always thought that certain very technical topics; it's a lot harder to be original in your writing. For example, Gene A expresses Protein A. Unless you want a convoluted sentence that makes no sense to the reader; you should convey the same information.
So I was a little surprised to come across this article about a GW professor that checked online some of the papers she was grading. She put into a search engine sentence fragments of students' papers of a pretty technical (IT-related) class. At first, I didn't think it was fair that she was using sentence fragments. Plagiarism is definitely copying whole papers and paragraphs but it's not fair if we cannot use the same vocabulary.
Then, I decided to follow her practice and copied pieces of a recent paper that I wrote through her process. The paper I wrote was very well referenced. However, when I went to her process, my paper though pretty technical passed her test. I did come across the following passage which I did reference that didn't pass the test:
"proto-oncogene products, or factors that regulate the activity of proto-oncogene products".
I go by principles that I learned as a undergraduate student of plagiarism is or is not. I don't believe that writing a paper should be about how to write a paper with as many synonyms as possible but about how much has been processed. My analogy would be a mother bird feeding a baby bird. What's regurgitated is going to sometimes look like what has gone in. I think students should be given some leeway when writing papers. I don't believe leeway should be given for PhD students for original work but students, especially undergraduate students, are still just learning.
I like writing referenced papers. It keeps any suspect out of my writing. Now, onto my next paper. All the plagiarism of this entry is my own (I hope).
Posted by azileretsis at November 30, 2007 06:10 PM
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