Brian Martin About Plagiarism
Brian Martin makes the following assertion about plagiarism:
These two types of plagiarism, competitive and institutionalized, can also be called retail and wholesale plagiarism, respectively, by analogy with Chomsky and Herman's (1979) distinction between retail and wholesale terrorism, namely small-scale killing by small groups and large-scale killing by major governments. Retail plagiarism typically exploits the intellectual labor of a few people at a time; wholesale plagiarism involves the systematic exploitation of large numbers of people as a matter of standard procedure.
Brian Martin in this article was of the opinion that there has been inordinate attention given to student scholarship plagiarism at the expense of many other forms of plagiarism in the outside world which are the most endemic in the scholarly world. The author does this successfully by first enumerating the types of plagiarism, which have been frequently emphasized on. In this case, he highlights word for word plagiarism; paraphrasing plagiarism; plagiarism of secondary sources; plagiarism of form of source; plagiarism of ideas and finally Plagiarism of authorship.Having laid this background the author then unravels the fact that policies on plagiarism have done very little to curb instances of plagiarism as perpetrated by persons who have fashioned established careers. A clear example of this is the fact that plagiarism was discovered in the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and instead of reprimand, scholars, who were concerned with his fight for civil rights, came to his defence.
This issue is further compounded by institutionalized plagiarism in which persons of high influence, mostly political power and higher social standing make publications or speeches which are written by their subordinates, but rarely do they acknowledge the contributions of the bearers of the original ideas. This article is so insightful about new perceptions that can be attached to the whole issue of plagiarism.
References
Martin. B. (1994) Plagiarism: a misplaced emphasis. Journal of Information Ethics, Vol. 3, No. 2, …
