Kelake,
In response to your post, many Asian scientists apparently claim that it is acceptable for them to plagiarize because they know the science but just can’t express it clearly in English which puts them at a disadvantage and besides, in Asian culture ideas do not belong to an individual but should be shared by the group. . . which I think is a bunch of hooey. If you take someone’s words use quotes and give credit. But, here’s what others say. . .
The candidate in line to become the president of National Chunghsing University, Peng Tso-kwei . . . More than 80 percent of Peng’s book is allegedly copied from the tome Agricultural Product Prices by Professors William Tomek and Kenneth Robinson, published by Cornell University Press. . . [in addition] a piece in a journal written by Peng . . . which had won an award in 1990 from the National Science Council. . . over 70 percent of the content was found to be similar in its content a book titled The Farm-Retail Price Spread in a Competitive Food Industry by Bruce Gardner, a professor of agricultural and resource economics in the US. . . Both Cornell University Press and Bruce Gardner issued a strongly worded letter last week criticizing Peng’s behavior. . .
taipeitimes.com/chnews/2000/09/2 … 0000054510
The journal Science recently published “Scientific Misconduct: Chinese Researchers Debate Rash of Plagiarism Cases” (Xiguang & Lei, 1996). . . The authors of the Science article described three cases of plagiarism that had come to light in China since 1993. . .
Of the three cases of plagiarism reported in the Science article . . . two concerned the wholesale appropriation of manuscripts. In one, a Chinese physicist sent an entire article that had been published by a Turkish scientist and an Italian scientist in an Italian journal to a Swiss journal, under his name. In the other, a Chinese physicist copied six papers written and published by a Chinese physicist in a different university in China, and submitted them to a U.S. journal under his own name. . . Pan Aihua, the Chinese principal author in the third case . . . was from Peking University. Like many international students in U.S. classes, he defended the copying of short sections of text from an author’s published research in genetics in another journal, saying that it had been due to his lack of English proficiency, not to a lack of ethics. . .
But the case of Pan Aihua brought different responses. Typical is this one from a Chinese chemist:
In developing countries, such as China and India, basic researchers encounter more difficulties than those in developed countries. Because of the shortage of funds they cannot buy many modern instruments and must work harder. Many scientists are not good at English. In order to publish their articles in foreign journals they have to translate their journals from Chinese to English. So they usually borrow some words from foreign articles. I don’t know if this is a kind of plagiarism.
A Taiwanese computer scientist wrote:
Most of important science researchers in Taiwan are trained in the western countries, especially, in the United States. As a consequence, the contribution of a research paper is judged by whether the paper can be published in journals of the Western countries, especially, in those of the United States. This criterion is very unfair for locally trained researchers. After working hard in research, locally trained researchers with poor English writing skill still need to struggle very hard for translating their research findings into English. It is even more disappointing when their papers are probably rejected simply because of writing problems. As a result, imitating the “sentence structures” from well-written papers seems a good way to escape from the writing problems.
www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej10/a2.html
Did he get in?
