“It might probably contain an unreasonable period of time, an unreasonable quantity of labor, and an unreasonably uphill wrestle to acquire retractions of philosophy publications, regardless of how blatant the plagiarism found and the way indeniable the documentation.”
Within the following visitor put up, Pernille Harsting and Michael V. Dougherty (Ohio Dominican College) recount their efforts to get a plagiarizing philosophy article retracted, focus on the challenges to getting such articles retracted, and touch upon the duties journal editors and publishers have in regard to retractions for plagiarism.
[Elmyr de Hory, “Woman at Table” (c.1975), a forgery in the style of Henri Matisse]
It’s All Too Onerous to Get Plagiarizing Philosophy Publications Retracted
by Pernille Harsting and Michael V. Dougherty
It’s all too arduous to get plagiarizing philosophy publications retracted.
Right here’s a living proof:
In December 2022, the editors of Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought, and Religion printed a retraction assertion—each online and within the printed model of the journal’s 2022 concern (vol. 77, p. 465)—for this text:
W. F. Stone, “Adrian of Utrecht and the College of Louvain: Theology and the Dialogue of Ethical Issues within the Late Fifteenth Century”, Traditio 61 (2006), pp. 247-287.
Though the in depth plagiarism by Stone within the Traditio article had been publicly flagged since 2010, it took 11 years, a brand new writer, a brand new editor-in-chief, and an entire mark-up with highlighting of all of the plagiarizing passages to acquire the retraction of this 41-page article.
The plagiarism was initially documented in our co-researched file on 40 of the plagiarizing publications that had appeared below the previous KULeuven philosophy professor’s title within the interval 1998-2009, “40 Cases of Plagiarism” (by M.V. Dougherty, P. Harsting and R. L. Friedman, in Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 51/2009, Turnhout: Brepols, 2010, pp. 350-391).
Because the 2010 file confirmed (“Case 28 (2006)”, p. 378), the primary a part of the Traditio article is a translation from German into English of passages from Chapter 4—“4. Adrian Florensz (Hadrian VI)”; “4.1 Biographische Einführung”; “4.2 Metaethische Analyse”—of this e-book:
Rudolf Branko Hein,“Gewissen” bei Adrian von Utrecht (Hadrian VI.), Erasmus von Rotterdam und Thomas Extra: Ein Beitrag zur systematischen Analyse des Gewissensbegriffs in der katholischen nordeuropäischen Renaissance (Studien der Moraltheologie 10; Münster: LIT Verlag, 1999).
We first contacted the editors of Traditio in October 2011 with a request for retraction of the article on account of plagiarism. At that time, the journal, which is still based at Fordham University, was printed by Fordham College Press. Within the e-mail to Traditio we enclosed a duplicate of the “40 Circumstances of Plagiarism” file, which particulars, web page for web page, the overlap between the 2006 article and the beforehand printed German supply, and presents a consultant instance of the interpretation plagiarism.
The editor-in-chief didn’t reply to the e-mail request; nor did we hear again from every other member of the journal’s editorial board.
In February 2012, Dougherty despatched a follow-up e-mail to the editors with a repeat request for retraction of the plagiarizing article. On 6 March 2012, the editor-in-chief replied that “the matter shall be handled on the subsequent assembly of the Board”, which was to happen “in March or April”. This sounded promising, however the e-mail—and apparently additionally the dialogue—was closed as follows:
“I additionally have to let you know, nevertheless, that the state of affairs was already recognized to us. The vice rector for analysis on the Okay. U. Leuven wrote to us in March of 2010 offering particulars in regards to the state of affairs and leaving a call in regards to the standing of the publication as much as us. The matter is finest dealt with, I imagine, between the Okay. U. Leuven and Traditio. Sincerely […]”
An extra follow-up e-mail of 9 April 2015 from Dougherty to the editor-in-chief went unanswered. And nonetheless nothing occurred—till six years later, in Could 2021, when Harsting marked up all of the plagiarizing passages in a PDF copy of the 41-page Traditio article and despatched this 1:1 documentary materials to the journal with one more request for retraction. Among the many co-signers of this renewed request was the creator, Rudolf Branko Hein, whose 1999 e-book had been plagiarized within the Traditio article and whose personal e-mail complaints, addressed and despatched to a member of the journal’s editorial board at first of 2010, had been disregarded.
Within the meantime, the publication of Traditio had been taken over by Cambridge College Press, and a brand new editor-in-chief had been appointed to go the journal and its editorial board (which, in 2021, nonetheless counted amongst its members a few of these copied on our emails of 2011, 2012, and 2015, together with the previous editor-in-chief).
Lastly issues began to maneuver: Within the late autumn of 2021, the web model of the plagiarizing article was retracted and watermarked as such on the Cambridge College Press web site. And in December 2022, this was adopted up by the publication of the editors’ official retraction assertion.
Clearly, we can not know what motivated the previous editor-in-chief’s inaction with regard to the issue of the plagiarizing Traditio article. However it’s a incontrovertible fact that to many editors of journals, handbooks, convention proceedings, e-book sequence, and so forth., in philosophy and different humanities fields, receiving a request for retraction of one in all their printed objects is ”a primary”, and infrequently they haven’t put tips and procedures in place to deal correctly with such a request.
Sadly, it additionally appears to be the case that, to some editors (in addition to their publishers), preserving the picture of a faultless and “scandal-free” publishing apply is extra vital than contributing actively to the upholding of excellent analysis requirements by unambiguously retracting plagiarizing and different fraudulent publications.
Regardless of the motive for editors to disregard complaints about documented findings of plagiarism within the publications they’re chargeable for, this laxity has penalties past the hurt it causes to the repute of the journals, e-book sequence, and so forth.—and to their publishers. Most significantly, whereas editors are trying the opposite manner or dragging their toes, the plagiarizing publications are nonetheless handled as in the event that they have been unique contributions to scholarship.
Thus, for 15 years—from 2006, when the Traditio article was printed, till the late autumn of 2021, when it was watermarked as retracted on Cambridge College Press’ on-line platform—readers have been misled in regards to the article’s authorship and originality, first by the author-of-record after which, since 2010, by the inaction of the journal editors.
Throughout the 11-year interval from early 2010, when the editors first realized in regards to the plagiarism downside, till late 2021, when the retraction for plagiarism was lastly issued, scholarly writers have stored crediting the author-of-record for the findings and wordings he had stolen from Hein’s beforehand printed work. There isn’t any doubt that not less than a few of the optimistic downstream citations and quotations of the plagiarizing Traditio article may have been averted, had the retraction been issued at once.
To say however a couple of latest examples of the continued optimistic quotation:
- A 32-word quotation from the Traditio article seems in a e-book from 2016 with translation of and commentary on a piece of Erasmus of Rotterdam. The unique creator of the quoted passage is Rudolf Branko Hein, however his e-book from 1999 shouldn’t be talked about in any respect—all credit score is given to the plagiarizing author-of-record.
- The same misattribution to the author-of-record for the Traditio article—and to not the real creator—is present in a 2017 dissertation.
In 2019, the Traditio article was recommended in these publications:
From 15 May 2016 till 11 October 2020, the Wikipedia entry for “Pope Adrian VI” contained a reference to the plagiarizing Traditio article. The reference was eliminated by an nameless Wikipedia editor, who identified two PubPeer postings from early 2018 (1, 2) that mentioned the plagiarism and authorship issues of the Traditio article.
Sadly, as of March 2023, the Traditio article nonetheless hasn’t been registered as retracted on such much-used platforms as JSTOR and Project Muse.
The continued quoting from and citing of plagiarizing publications is troubling, for a number of causes. To begin with, and most clearly, plagiarism is an act of theft—of authorship, of analysis materials, of analysis outcomes—and stolen items ought to be returned to the right proprietor and never be additional “dealt with”.
Moreover, regardless of all their copying efforts, plagiarists usually are not essentially good copyists. Nor are they essentially good translators. In truth, not a couple of errors have occurred throughout the clandestine switch of fabric from the unique German-language supply into the English-language Traditio textual content: errors have been inserted within the copied Latin quotations; within the copied web page references; within the copied dates; within the copied names of authors of secondary literature; and different errors are the results of misunderstandings and mis-translations of the unique German textual content (and the Latin phrases and sources quoted there).
In brief: the Traditio article is under no circumstances dependable and shouldn’t be additional quoted or cited. Readers serious about the subject material ought to seek the advice of Rudolf Branko Hein’s unique German e-book in addition to his English-language article, “Conscience: Dictator or Information?—Meta-Moral and Biographical Reflections within the Gentle of a Humanist Idea of Conscience”, in Bernard Hoose, Julie Clague and Gerard Mannion (eds.), Ethical Theology for the Twenty-First Century: Essays in Celebration of Kevin Kelly (London, T&T Clark, 2008), pp. 34-50.
The saga of the plagiarizing Traditio article ended with an unambiguous retraction. We’re grateful to the brand new editor-in-chief and the brand new writer of the journal for issuing the much-needed retraction. In line with Retraction Watch Database, the Traditio retraction is quantity 15—along with three “expressions of concern”—for the author-of-record. For a time, the retraction depend even earned him an ignominious listing on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard.
However the Traditio case additionally demonstrates that it may possibly contain an unreasonable period of time, an unreasonable quantity of labor, and an unreasonably uphill wrestle to acquire retractions of philosophy publications, regardless of how blatant the plagiarism found and the way indeniable the documentation. Whereas there was a rise, since 2010, within the discovery of instances of intensive (”serial”) plagiarism within the subject, it has in the identical interval change into more and more arduous to acquire retractions for plagiarizing philosophy publications. Extremely sufficient, there are but different plagiarizing objects by the Traditio article’s author-of-record that still need to be retracted.
In our expertise it’s sometimes very troublesome to safe retractions for plagiarizing publications from a few of the most dominant business publishers of analysis literature: appeals to those massive gamers to treat retractions as an act of accountability and a significant contribution to the upholding of educational integrity too usually haven’t any impact by any means. Which means that some tutorial editors are left very a lot on their very own, with out help from their writer, when confronted with requests for retraction of publications for which they as editors are in the end accountable.
In philosophy, as in academia generally, we’ve entrusted journal and e-book editors with a key perform: we’ve made them the foremost gatekeepers within the joint endeavor of guaranteeing and upholding the reliability and high quality of printed analysis. Accordingly, we should have the ability to depend on tutorial editors to reply with integrity to the belief positioned in them—and we should have the ability to count on that these entrusted editors won’t ignore, tolerate, or gloss over plagiarism and different outcomes of educational misdoing that could be found within the publications for which they’ve moral and obligation.
It’s a optimistic growth that lots of the conventional tutorial publishers have begun to arrange analysis and publication ethics committees and have issued ethics tips for his or her publishing apply. When utilized in apply, such measures enhance the standard of publications, and so they facilitate the work of educational journal and e-book editors who will know exactly what to do when introduced with well-documented requests for retraction of publications on account of plagiarism or different tutorial fraud.
As integrity-based publishing requirements are being carried out, it’s subsequently to be hoped that philosophy (and different tutorial) editors shall be extra inclined to take care of well-founded complaints about plagiarism of their edited publications—and that extra editors will see the issuance of well timed retractions as an obligation and as a service to their subject.
