This is the first academic paper concerned with the description of intertranslational appropriations across non-literary works and to discuss this phenomenon from a novel conceptual perspective by suggesting the term “pseudo-retranslation”. “Drmrod”, a misspelling of Ormrod, served as the benchmark of the preliminary analysis to judge on the existence of pseudo-retranslations across the works. The corpus consists of one unreviewed article, two dissertations, five master’s theses, and seven articles. To identify the initial Turkish translation, Patient Zero, to detect the pseudo-retranslations (...) and to arrange them chronologically, “textual overlap” was operationalized as the primary parameter, while “erroneous referencing”, “typographical errors”, “publication year”, “publication media”, and “relationships between authors” to triangulate the findings concerning the primary parameter. A program, WCopyFind, was used to detect intertextual similarities and to harvest quantitative data by percentage and word count. A textual similarity of 70%, 1–26, 2004) was set as the threshold of significance. The author suggested a threshold of 30% to describe pseudo-retranslations in academic works and of 20% in Turkish academic papers. The unreviewed online article was revealed to be the first to misspell “Ormrod” as “Drmrod” and to translate Ormrod’s six metacognitive skills and the other 14 works to include its pseudo-retranslations. (shrink)

I argue that wrong of plagiarism does not primarily stem from the plagiarist’s illicit misappropriation of academic credit from the person she plagiarized. Instead, plagiarism is wrongful to the degree to which it runs counter to the purpose of academic work. Given that this is to increase knowledge and further understanding plagiarism will be wrongful to the extent that it impedes the achievement of these ends. This account of the wrong of plagiarism has two surprising (and related) implications. First, it (...) follows from this account of the wrong of plagiarism that replication plagiarism might not be an academic wrong at all. (Replication plagiarism consists of the direct quotation or paraphrase of another’s work without attribution. The replication plagiarist thus plagiarizes primary sources, purloining for her own benefit the ideas of their authors). Second, even if replication plagiarism is still held to be an academic wrong, it will be a lesser wrong than bypass plagiarism. (Bypass plagiarism occurs when one quotes from, or provides a paraphrase of, a primary source, but although one cites the primary source one did not identify the quotation or provide the initial paraphrase oneself. Instead, one took the quotation, or drew upon an existing paraphrase, from a secondary source—and one did so without citing the secondary source to credit it as the source of one’s information about the primary source). Holding that bypass plagiarism is worse than replication plagiarizes reverses the usual assessment of the relative wrong of these two types of plagiarism. (shrink)

Qualitative fieldwork research on sensitive topics sometimes requires that interviewees be granted confidentiality and anonymity. When qualitative researchers later publish their findings, they must ensure that any statements obtained during fieldwork interviews cannot be traced back to the interviewees. Given these protections to interviewees, the integrity of the published findings cannot usually be verified or replicated by third parties, and the scholarly community must trust the word of qualitative researchers when they publish their results. This trust is fundamentally abused, however, (...) when researchers publish articles reporting qualitative fieldwork data that they never collected. Using only publicly available information, I argue that a 2017 article in an Elsevier foreign policy and international relations journal presents anonymised fieldwork interviews that could not have occurred as described. As an exercise in post-publication peer review (PPPR), this paper examines the evidence that calls into question the reliability of the putative fieldwork quotations. I show further that the 2017 article is not a unique case. The anonymity and confidentiality protections common in some areas of research create an ethical problem: the protections necessary for obtaining research data can be used as a cover to hide substandard research practices as well as research misconduct. (shrink)