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January 25, 2006

The Authorship Patrol (updated)

Michele forwards a link to Scott McLemee's article on plagiarism in today's IHE. McLemee gives some press to John Lesko and his journal Plagiary. Neither McLemee nor his first three commenters undertake any qualitative analysis of that journal. McLemee does note, though, that Lesko describes himself as "conservative." Yet, hey, open-minded, as the Plagiary homepage demonstrates:

Plagiary address the issue of fraudulent contributions to disciplinary discourse communities and the potential (and actual) corruption of the professional literature and other genres of discourse as a result of such derivative and/or fraudulent "contributions" to discoursal interchange.

Yet along with such fraudulent representations which seem to be quite common across various discourse communities, there are also legimate means of derivative expression, and studies which analyze such topics as mimicry, parody, pastiche and the like are welcome for publications consideration.

Check.

Jeff is a little skeptical/exasperated, too.

Posted by senioritis at January 25, 2006 03:18 PM

Comments

legimate? discoursal? How about we start our own journal on funky word usage!

Posted by: susansinclair at January 25, 2006 06:31 PM

So far Plagiary has published one article and a book review. At this point, a qualitative analysis of the journal might be somewhat premature.

Posted by: Scott McLemee at January 27, 2006 07:50 AM

It's worth asking, though, about the editor and editorial board; their expertise on the topic; and the sponsorship of the journal. Things like that are worth pondering, in addition to from whatever perspectives and positions are indicated in the journal's self-explanatory apparatus. I'm not suggesting that journalists or their commenters need make such evaluations. Rather, I'm alerting fellow scholars that no such evaluation was conducted in the preparation of the IHE story. Yours is a news story, reporting on a phenomenon that is indeed interesting, worthy of note. Scholars who might contemplate subscribing to or submitting to the journal in question need to take a few additional steps.

Posted by: senioritis at January 27, 2006 08:09 AM