Digenis.org

Списывание с одного источника - плагиат, с двух - компиляция, с трёх и более - диссертация.

I wasn’t going to enter the discussion about the accusations of Putin plagiarizing his PhD thesis seeing as the Accidental Russophile has already blogged it and some great commentary has followed over there. Plus, I like to keep any Putin-related rants on this site to a bare minimum, just for my own sake as a foreigner living in Russia…

However, even though I wrote about my observations on plagiarism in Russia back in 2004, the topic keeps coming up and I’ve decided to enter the fray. But instead of delving into my own feelings on this, I thought it would be a bit more interesting to see what the Russian blogosphere and Рунет had to say about it.

I began over at Technorati, a weblog search engine which claims to keep track of what’s happening on 33.4 million blogs. Though it doesn’t yet have too many Russian-language blogs in its database, I was able to find 82 entries with a “??????? ?????” query.

I was disappointed to find that most people were merely posting links to articles and not offering commentary, but I’ve still managed to skim through many and cull some sound-bites:

LJ user Elephleo:
Моя позиция по данному вопросу следующая: есть в тексте диссера куски чужой книги или нет - не так важно, как то - ссылается диссертант на первоисточник или нет. Если нет - однозначно плагиат, если да…все претензии к ученому совету, пропустившему фуфел горбатый (малоинтересную работу). С другой же стороны, поскольку ученый совет в данном вопросе изрекает истину в последней инстанции, всем прочим остается только принять решение высокоученой коллегии.

My position on this subject is as follows: Whether or not this dissertation contains excerpts from some other book is not as important as whether or not the author cites the original sources. If there’s no citation, it’s simply plagiarism. If there are… then all claims should be directed to the academic council which passed this piece of deranged rubbish (uninteresting paper). On the other hand, seeing as that academic council has failed to make the right decision in the past case, all other decisions should be made by a highly scholarly board.

Also a comment that follows LJ user sdanilov’s post:

Ammosov writes:
Думаю, что списывал, своими словами или нет, не знаю. Но квалифицирующие признаки плагиата - это не только неоргинальность, но и попытка выдать чужие мысли за свои. А тут налицо только неоригинальность, но не отрицание авторства. Вот будь у нас такая дефиниция, было б проще - “четыре слова в ряд не закавычены - виновен”.

I think that he copied (from Gaddy), but I don’t know if he paraphrased it or not. The defining characteristic of plagiarism is not just unoriginality, but also the attempt to pass off another’s thoughts as one’s own. Here we have unoriginality, but no denial of authorship. It would be simpler for us if we accept this definition of plagiarism: “…four consecutive words without quotation marks.”

At Nika Dubrovsky’s LJ, a commenter sees it all as a political and psychological attack on Putin:

salnikov_vova said:
Это просто очерендная акция против Путина. Психологическая война… Поручили несколькоим информагенствам и они теперь тщательно копаются во всех обстоятельствах жизни Путина, придумывая компромат. …Кто слышал, как Путин по три часа общается в эфире с населнием, отвечая на совершенно разные вопросы и разбирая очень разные проблемы, понимает, что президент совершенно адекватен.
Ждите завтра информацию, что Путин антисемит…
This is just the usual anti-Putin cause. It’s psychological warfare…They pass on this info to a few news agencies and now they’ll go digging deep into every aspect of Putin’s life, thinking up compromising material along the way. Anyone who’s heard him speak on the air for 3 hours at a time with the Russian public, answering all different kinds of questions and solving all types of problens, knows that the president is totally competent.

Just wait until tomorrow when they announce that Putin is an anti-semite…

The discussion at LJ user group ru_politics quickly devolved into ethnic insults and vulgarity.

Still, I think the best discussion on this topic has taken place on a few forums, namely Alex Exler’s Forum (8 pages and counting) and the Canada.ru boards.

I suppose what it might come down to is that there seems to be fundamental differences in how Westerners and Russians define and academic plagiarism and to what extent they feel citations are necessary.

Oh, and as this post was all about rounding up people’s views on plagiarism, comments are more welcome than ever.