"High-profile cases of literary borrowing are leaping to view with increasing frequency. Jonah Lehrer not only reused his own material but also made up quotes, resulting in his departure from his job as a New Yorker staff writer and the pulping of two of his books. Time columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria was briefly suspended for using passages from another writer's work in one of his columns. Questions of borrowing have touched historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin and novelist Ian McEwan. Publishers have taken the heat in some cases for their less-than-rigorous fact-checking of manuscripts.
Judging an author's culpability in cases of literary borrowing is complicated, said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute and co-author of a book on press ethics, "Elements of Journalism." Questions of intent, haste, carelessness, number and length of echoed passages all come into play.
Appropriating another author's ideas as one's own and inventing material and presenting it as fact are among the gravest literary lapses. Neither appears to have occurred in "Seeds of Hope."
By academic standards, however, the content-copying of "Seeds of Hope" is unacceptable, said Lena Struwe, a plant biology professor at Rutgers and director of the university's Chrysler Herbarium, who publishes a blog called Botanical Accuracy. If a Rutgers graduate student turned in a paper containing similar infractions, she wrote in an e-mail after reviewing the examples, the student would be reported to administrators, punished and possibly expelled."
Interesting. Read more by clicking, here: Jane Goodall's 'Seeds of Hope' book contains borrowed passages without attribution
- Ikhide
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