Not quite, and the specifics can matter a lot in cases like this. The way it was explained to me that made the most sense, was to imagine if there were two types of plagiarism: felony and misdemeanor. Felony plagiarism is taking someone else’s idea and claiming it as your own, or directly quoting an original idea without putting it in quotes, and pretending it was your idea all along. Misdemeanor plagiarism is not properly citing someone else’s idea, or simply misattributing a quote or well-established concept. Not that hard to do to be honest, and while the latter is careless and shouldn’t ever happen, Gay was accused of what would be a misdemeanor plagiarism. She didn’t steal anyone’s ideas, she just did a bad job at attribution. The distinction matters, though what she did still isn’t good, to be fair.
I challenge the idea that it is even possible to plagiarise an Acknowledgements section. It’s not a substantive section of the work and has no bearing on the work itself. In addition, boilerplate is not only extremely common for Acknowledgements, for a paper it’s essentially required. All of the acknowledgement sections of my papers are basically identical, and are basically identical to all of my colleagues on the same funding, because that’s how it works. Did we plagiarise each other or our supervisor by saying “This study was supported by ERC Horizon 2030 grant no. Xxxxxx, The Extremely Solid Study (TESS)”?
Without that article actually showing what was supposedly plagiarised in her acknowledgements, I don’t buy it.
"But her papers sometimes lift passages verbatim from other scholars and at other times make minor adjustments, like changing the word “adage” to “popular saying” or “Black male children” to “young black athletes.” - New York Times
Not quite, and the specifics can matter a lot in cases like this. The way it was explained to me that made the most sense, was to imagine if there were two types of plagiarism: felony and misdemeanor. Felony plagiarism is taking someone else’s idea and claiming it as your own, or directly quoting an original idea without putting it in quotes, and pretending it was your idea all along. Misdemeanor plagiarism is not properly citing someone else’s idea, or simply misattributing a quote or well-established concept. Not that hard to do to be honest, and while the latter is careless and shouldn’t ever happen, Gay was accused of what would be a misdemeanor plagiarism. She didn’t steal anyone’s ideas, she just did a bad job at attribution. The distinction matters, though what she did still isn’t good, to be fair.
Dude whatever you heard is wrong. She directly copied stuff.
She was so blatant or lazy she copied the acknowledgement sections.
Do you have a source on that? Not saying you’re wrong, but so far the only sources I find are backing up what the other person said.
Here you go: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/31/honor-council-member-gay/
Thanks
I challenge the idea that it is even possible to plagiarise an Acknowledgements section. It’s not a substantive section of the work and has no bearing on the work itself. In addition, boilerplate is not only extremely common for Acknowledgements, for a paper it’s essentially required. All of the acknowledgement sections of my papers are basically identical, and are basically identical to all of my colleagues on the same funding, because that’s how it works. Did we plagiarise each other or our supervisor by saying “This study was supported by ERC Horizon 2030 grant no. Xxxxxx, The Extremely Solid Study (TESS)”?
Without that article actually showing what was supposedly plagiarised in her acknowledgements, I don’t buy it.
Well Google works but just because I care here’s a link to some other examples of clear plagiarism you will find an excuse to ignore.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/us/claudine-gay-harvard-president-excerpts.html
"But her papers sometimes lift passages verbatim from other scholars and at other times make minor adjustments, like changing the word “adage” to “popular saying” or “Black male children” to “young black athletes.” - New York Times