Tag Archives: plagiarism

Some musings on Jonah Lehrer’s $20,000 “meh culpa”.

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Remember some months ago when we were talking about how Jonah Lehrer was making stuff up in his “non-fiction” pop science books? This was as big enough deal that his publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, recalled print copies of Lehrer’s book Imagine, and that the media outlets for which Lehrer wrote went back through his writing for them looking for “irregularities” (like plagiarism — which one hopes is not regular, but once your trust has been abused, hopes are no longer all that durable).

Lehrer’s behavior was clearly out of bounds for anyone hoping for a shred of credibility as a journalist or non-fiction author. However, at the time, I opined in a comment:

At 31, I think Jonah Lehrer has time to redeem himself and earn back trust and stuff like that.

Well, the events of this week stand as evidence that having time to redeem oneself is not a guarantee that one will not instead dig the hole deeper.

You see, Jonah Lehrer was invited to give a talk this week at a “media learning seminar” in Miami, a talk which marked his first real public comments a large group of journalistic peers since his fabrications and plagiarism were exposed — and a talk for which the sponsor of the conference, the Knight Foundation, paid Lehrer an honorarium of $20,000.

At the New York Times “Arts Beat” blog, Jennifer Schuessler describes Lehrer’s talk:

Mr. Lehrer … dived right in with a full-throated mea culpa. “I am the author of a book on creativity that contains several fabricated Bob Dylan quotes,” he told the crowd, which apparently could not be counted on to have followed the intense schadenfreude-laced commentary that accompanied his downfall. “I committed plagiarism on my blog, taking without credit or citation an entire paragraph from the blog of Christian Jarrett. I plagiarized from myself. I lied to a journalist named Michael Moynihan to cover up the Dylan fabrications.”

“My mistakes have caused deep pain to those I care about,” he continued. “I’m constantly remembering all the people I’ve hurt and let down.”

If the introduction had the ring of an Alcoholics Anonymous declaration, before too long Mr. Lehrer was surrendering to the higher power of scientific research, cutting back and forth between his own story and the kind of scientific terms — “confirmation bias,” “anchoring” — he helped popularize. Within minutes he had pivoted from his own “arrogance” and other character flaws to the article on flawed forensic science within the F.B.I. that he was working on when his career began unraveling, at one point likening his own corner-cutting to the overconfidence of F.B.I. scientists who fingered the wrong suspect in the 2004 Madrid bombings.

“If we try to hide our mistakes, as I did, any error can become a catastrophe,” he said, adding: “The only way to prevent big failures is a willingness to consider every little one.”

Not everyone shares the view that Lehrer’s apology constituted a full-throated mea culpa, though. At Slate, Daniel Engber shared this assessment:

Lehrer has been humbled, and yet nearly every bullet in his speech managed to fire in both directions. It was a wild display of self-negation, of humble arrogance and arrogant humility. What are these “standard operating procedures” according to which Lehrer will now do his work? He says he’ll be more scrupulous in his methods—even recording and transcribing interviews(!)—but in the same breath promises that other people will be more scrupulous of him. “I need my critics to tell me what I’ve gotten wrong,” he said, as if to blame his adoring crowds at TED for past offenses. Then he promised that all his future pieces would be fact-checked, which is certainly true but hardly indicative of his “getting better” (as he puts it, in the clammy, familiar rhetoric of self-help).

What remorse Lehrer had to share was couched in elaborate and perplexing disavowals. He tried to explain his behavior as, first of all, a hazard of working in an expert field. Like forensic scientists who misjudge fingerprints and DNA analyses, and whose failings Lehrer elaborated on in his speech, he was blind to his own shortcomings. These two categories of mistake hardly seem analogous—lab errors are sloppiness, making up quotes is willful distortion—yet somehow the story made Lehrer out to be a hapless civil servant, a well-intentioned victim of his wonky and imperfect brain.

(Bold emphasis added.)

At Forbes, Jeff Bercovici noted:

Ever the original thinker, even when he’s plagiarizing from press releases, Lehrer apologized abjectly for his actions but pointedly avoided promising to become a better person. “These flaws are a basic part of me,” he said. “They’re as fundamental to me as the other parts of me I’m not ashamed of.”

Still, Lehrer said he is aiming to return to the world of journalism, and has been spending several hours a day writing. “It’s my hope that someday my transgressions might be forgiven,” he said.

How, then, does he propose to bridge the rather large credibility gap he faces? By the methods of the technocrat, not the ethicist: “What I clearly need is a new set of rules, a stricter set of standard operating procedures,” he said. “If I’m lucky enough to write again, then whatever I write will be fully fact-checked and footnoted. Every conversation will be fully taped and transcribed.”

(Bold emphasis added.)

How do I see Jonah Lehrer’s statement? The title of this post should give you a clue. Like most bloggers, I took five years of Latin.* “Mea culpa” would describe a statement wherein the speaker (in this case, Jonah Lehrer) actually acknowledged that the blame was his for the bad thing of which he was a part. From what I can gather, Lehrer hasn’t quite done that.

Let the record reflect that the “new set of rules” and “stricter set of standard operating procedures” Lehrer described in his talk are not new, nor were they non-standard when Lehrer was falsifying and plagiarizing to build his stories. It’s not that Jonah Lehrer’s unfortunate trajectory shed light on the need for these standards, and now the journalistic community (and we consumers of journalism) can benefit from their creation. Serious journalists were already using these standards.

Jonah Lehrer, however, decided he didn’t need to use them.

This does have a taste of Leona Helmsleyesque “rules are for the little people” to it. And, I think it’s important to note that Lehrer gave the outward appearance of following the rules. He did not stand up and say, “I think these rules are unnecessary to good journalistic practice, and here’s why…” Rather, he quietly excused himself from following them.

But now, Lehrer tells us, he recognizes the importance of the rules.

That’s well and good. However, the rules he’s pointing to — taping and transcribing interviews, fact-checking claims and footnoting sources — seem designed to prevent unwitting mistakes. They could head off misremembering what interviewees said, miscommunicating whose words or insights animate part of a story, getting the facts wrong accidentally. It’s less clear that these rules can head off willful lies and efforts to mislead — which is to say, the kind of misdeeds that got Lehrer into trouble.

Moreover, that he now accepts these rules after being caught lying does not indicate that Jonah Lehrer is now especially sage about journalism. It’s remedial work.

Let’s move on from his endorsement (finally) of standards of journalistic practice to the constellation of cognitive biases and weaknesses of will that Jonah Lehrer seems to be trying to saddle with the responsibility for his lies.

Recognizing cognitive biases is a good thing. It is useful to the extent that it helps us to avoid getting fooled by them. You’ll recall that, knowledge-builders, whether scientists or journalists, are supposed to do their best to avoid being fooled.

But, what Lehrer did is hard to cast in terms of ignoring strong cognitive biases. He made stuff up. He fabricated quotes. He presented other authors’ writing as his own. When confronted about his falsifications, he lied. Did his cognitive biases do all this?

What Jonah Lehrer seems to be sidestepping in his “meh culpa” is the fact that, when he had to make choices about whether to work with the actual facts or instead to make stuff up, about whether to write his own pieces (or at least to properly cite the material from others that he used) or to plagiarize, about whether to be honest about what he’d done when confronted or to lie some more, he decided to be dishonest.

If we’re to believe this was a choice his cognitive biases made for him, then his seem much more powerful (and dangerous) than the garden-variety cognitive biases most grown-up humans have.

It seems to me more plausible that Lehrer’s problem was a weakness of will. It’s not that he didn’t know what he was doing was wrong — he wasn’t fooled by his brain into believing it was OK, or else he wouldn’t have tried to conceal it. Instead, despite recognizing the wrongness of his deeds, he couldn’t muster the effort not to do them.

If Jonah Lehrer cannot recognize this — that it frequently requires conscious effort to do the right thing — it’s hard to believe he’ll be committed to putting that effort into doing the right (journalistic) thing going forward. Verily, given the trust he’s burned with his journalistic colleagues, he can expect that proving himself to be reformed will require extra effort.

But maybe what Lehrer is claiming is something different. Maybe he’s denying that he understood the right thing to do and then opted not to do it because it seemed like too much work. Maybe he’s claiming instead that he just couldn’t resist the temptation (whether of rule-breaking for its own sake or of rule-breaking as the most efficient route to secure the prestige he craved). In other words, maybe he’s saying he was literally powerless, that he could not help committing those misdeeds.

If that’s Lehrer’s claim — and if, in addition, he’s claiming that the piece of his cognitive apparatus that was so vulnerable to temptation that it seized control to make him do wrong is as integral to who Jonah Lehrer is as his cognitive biases are — the whole rehabilitation thing may be a non-starter. If this is how Lehrer understands why he did wrong, he seems to be identifying himself as a wrongdoer with a high probability of reoffending.

If he can parlay that into more five-figure speaker fees, maybe that will be a decent living for Jonah Lehrer, but it will be a big problem for the community of journalists and for the public that trusts journalists as generally reliable sources of information.

Weakness is part of Lehrer, as it is for all of us, but it is not a part he is acknowledging he could control or counteract by concerted effort, or by asking for help from others.

It’s part of him, but not in a way that makes him inclined to actually take responsibility or to acknowledge that he could have done otherwise under the circumstances.

If he couldn’t have done otherwise — and if he might not be able to when faced with similar temptation in the future — then Jonah Lehrer has no business in journalism. Until he can recognize his own agency, and the responsibility that attaches to it, the most he has to offer is one more cautionary tale.
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*Fact check: I have absolutely no idea how many other bloggers took five years of Latin. My evidence-free guess is that it’s not just me.

Blogging and recycling: thoughts on the ethics of reuse.

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Owing to summer-session teaching and a sprained ankle, I have been less attentive to the churn of online happenings than I usually am, but an email from SciCurious brought to my attention a recent controversy about a blogger’s “self-plagiarism” of his own earlier writing in his blog posts (and in one of his books).

SciCurious asked for my thoughts on the matter, and what follows is very close to what I emailed her in reply this morning. I should note that these thoughts were composed before I took to the Googles to look for links or to read up on the details of the particular controversy playing out. This means that I’ve spoken to what I understand as the general lay of the ethical land here, but I have probably not addressed some of the specific details that people elsewhere are discussing.

Here’s the broad question: Is it unethical for a blogger to reuse in blog posts material she has published before (including in earlier blog posts)?

A lot of people who write blogs are using them with the clear intention (clear at least to themselves) of developing ideas for “more serious” writing projects — books, or magazine articles or what have you. I myself am leaning heavily on stuff I’ve blogged over the past seven-plus years in writing the textbook I’m trying to finish, and plan similarly to draw on old blog posts for at least two other books that are in my head (if I can ever get them out of my head and into book form).

That this is an intended outcome is part of why many blog authors who are lucky enough get paying blogging gigs, especially those of us from academia, fight hard for ownership of what they post and for the explicit right to reuse what they’ve written.

So, I wouldn’t generally judge reuse of what one has written in blog posts as self-plagiarism, nor as unethical. Of course, my book(s) will explicitly acknowledge my blogs as the site-of-first-publication for earlier versions of the arguments I put forward. (My book(s) will also acknowledge the debt I owe to commenters on my posts who have pushed me to think much more carefully about the issues I’ve posted on.)

That said, if one is writing in a context where one has agreed to a rule that says, in effect, “Everything you write for us must be shiny and brand-new and never published by you before elsewhere in any form,” then one is obligated not to recycle what one has written elsewhere. That’s what it means to agree to a rule. If you think it’s a bad rule, you shouldn’t agree to it — and indeed, perhaps you should mount a reasoned argument as to why it’s a bad rule. Agreeing to follow the rule and then not following the rule, however, is unethical.

There are venues (including the Scientific American Blog Network) that are OK with bloggers of long standing brushing off posts from the archives. I’ve exercised this option more than once, though I usually make an effort to significantly update, expand, or otherwise revise those posts I recycle (if for no other reason than I don’t always fully agree with what that earlier time-slice of myself wrote).

This kind of reuse is OK with my corporate master. Does that necessarily make it ethical?

Potentially it would be unethical if it imposed a harm on my readers — that is, if they (you) were harmed by my reposting those posts of yore. But, I think that would require either that I had some sort of contract (express or implied) with my readers that I only post thoughts I have never posted before, or that my reposts mislead them about what I actually believe at the moment I hit the “publish” button. I don’t have such a contract with my readers (at least, I don’t think I do), and my revision of the posts I recycle is intended to make sure that they don’t mislead readers about what I believe.

Back-linking to the original post is probably good practice (from the point of view of making reuse transparent) … but I don’t always do this.

One reason is that the substantial revisions make the new posts substantially different — making different claims, coming to different conclusions, offering different reasons. The old post is an ancestor, but it’s not the same creature anymore.

Another reason is that some of the original posts I’m recycling are from my ancient Blogspot blog, from whose backend I am locked out after a recent Google update/migration — and I fear that the blog itself may disappear, which would leave my updated posts with back-links to nowhere. Bloggers tend to view back-links to nowhere as a very bad thing.

The whole question of “self-plagiarism” as an ethical problem is an interesting one, since I think there’s a relevant difference between self-plagiarism and ethical reuse.

Plagiarism, after all, is use of someone else’s words or ideas (or data, or source-code, etc.) without proper attribution. If you’re reusing your own words or ideas (or whatnot), it’s not like you’re misrepresenting them as your own when they’re really someone else’s.

There are instances, however, where self-reuse presents gets people rightly exercised. For example, some scientists reuse their own stuff to create the appearance in the scientific literature that they’ve conducted more experimental studies than they actually have, or that there are more published results supporting their hypotheses than there really are. This kind of artificial multiplication of scientific studies is ethically problematic because it is intended to mislead (and indeed, may succeed in misleading), not because the scientists involved haven’t given fair credit to the earlier time-slices of themselves. (A recent editorial for ACS Nano gives a nice discussion of other problematic aspects of “self-plagiarism” within the context of scientific publishing.)

The right ethical diagnosis of the controversy du jour may depend in part on whether journalistic ethics forbid reuse (explicitly or implicitly) — and if so, on whether (or in what conditions) bloggers count as journalists. At some level, this goes beyond what is spelled out in one’s blogging contract and turns also on the relationship between the blogger and the reader. What kind of expectations can the reader have of the blogger? What kind of expectations ought the reader to have of the blogger? To the extent that blogging is a conversation of a sort (especially when commenting is enabled), is it appropriate for that conversation to loop back to territory visited before, or is the blogger obligated always to break new ground?

And, if the readers are harmed when the blogger recycles her own back-catalogue, what exactly is the nature of that harm?

End-of-semester meditations on plagiarism.

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Plagiarism — presenting the words or ideas (among other things) of someone else as one’s own rather than properly citing their source — is one of the banes of my professorial existence. One of my dearest hopes at the beginning of each academic term is that this will be the term with no instances of plagiarism in the student work submitted for my evaluation.

Ten years into this academic post and I’m still waiting for that plagiarism-free term.

One school of thought posits that students plagiarize because they simply don’t understand the rules around proper citation of sources. Consequently, professorial types go to great lengths to lay out how properly to cite sources of various types. They put explicit language about plagiarism and proper citation in their syllabi. They devote hours to crafting handouts to spell out expected citation practices. They require their students to take (and pass) plagiarism tutorials developed by information literacy professionals (the people who, in my day, we called university librarians).

And, students persist in plagiarizing.

Another school of thought lays widespread student plagiarism at the feet of the new digital age.

What with all sorts of information resources available through the internets, and with copy-and-paste technology, assembling a paper that meets the minimum page length for your assignment has never been easier. Back in the olden times, our forefathers had to actually haul the sources from which they were stealing off the shelves, maybe carry them back to the dorms through the snow, find their DOS disk to boot up the dorm PC, and then laboriously transcribe those stolen passages!

And it’s not just that the copy-and-paste option exists, we are told. College students have grown up stealing music and movies online. They’ve come of age along with Wikipedia, where information is offered free for their use and without authorship credits. If “information wants to be free” (a slogan attributed to Stewart Brand in 1984), how can these young people make sense of intellectual property, and especially of the need to cite the sources from which they found the information they are using? Is not their “plagiarism” just a form of pastiche, an activity that their crusty old professors fail to recognize as creative?

Yeah, the modern world is totally different, dude. There are tales of students copying not just Wikipedia articles but also things like online FAQs, verbatim, in student papers without citing the source, and indeed while professing that they didn’t think they needed to cite them because there was no author listed. You know what source kids used to copy from in my day that didn’t list authors? The World Book Encyclopedia. Indeed, from at least seventh grade, our teachers made a big deal of teaching us how to cite encyclopedia and newspaper articles with no named authors. Every citation guide I’ve seen in recent years (including the ones that talk about proper ways to cite web pages) includes instruction on how to cite such sources.

The fact that plagiarism is perhaps less labor-intensive than it used to be strikes me as an entirely separate issue from whether kids today understand that it’s wrong. If young people are literally powerless to resist the temptations presented to them by the internet, maybe we should be getting computers out of the classroom rather than putting more computers into the classroom.

Of course, the fact that not every student plagiarizes argues against the claim that students can’t help it. Clearly, some of them can.

There is research that indicates students plagiarize less in circumstances where they know that their work is going to be scanned with plagiarism-detection software. Here, it’s not that the existence or use of the software suddenly teaches students something they didn’t already know about proper citation. Rather, the extra 28 grams of prevention comes from an expectation that the software will be checking to see if they followed the rules of scholarship that they already understood.

My own experience suggests that one doesn’t require an expensive proprietary plagiarism-detection system like Turnitin — plugging the phrases in the assignment that just don’t sound like a college student wrote them into a reasonably good search engine usually delivers the uncited sources in seconds.

It also suggests that even when students are informed that you will be using software or search engines to check for plagiarism, some students still plagiarize.

Perhaps a better approach is to frame plagiarism as a violation of trust in a community that, ultimately, has an interest in being more focused on learning than on crime and punishment. This is an approach to which I’m sympathetic, which probably comes through in the version of “the talk” on academic dishonesty I give my students at the start of the semester:

Plagiarism is evil. I used to think I was a big enough person not to take it personally if someone plagiarized on an assignment for my class. I now know that I was wrong about that. I take it very personally.


For one thing, I’m here doing everything I can to help you learn this stuff that I think is really interesting and important. I know you may not believe yet that it’s interesting and important, but I hope you’ll let me try to persuade you. And, I hope you’ll put an honest effort into learning it. If you try hard and you give it a chance, I can respect that. If you make the calculation that, given the other things on your plate, you can’t put in the kind of time and effort I’m expecting and you choose to put in what you can, I’ll respect that, too. But if you decide it’s not worth your time or effort to even try, and instead you turn to plagiarism to make it look like you learned something — well, you’re saying that the stuff you’re supposedly here to learn is of no value, except to get you the grades and the credits you want. I care about that stuff. So I take it personally when you decide, despite all I’m doing here, that it’s of no value. Moreover, this is not a diploma mill where you pay your money and get your degree. If you want the three credits from my course, the terms of engagement are that you’ll have to show some evidence of learning.


Even worse, when you hand in an essay that you’ve copied from the internet, you’re telling me you don’t think I’m smart enough to tell the difference between your words and ideas and something you found in 5 minutes with Google. You’re telling me you think I’m stupid. I take that personally, too.


If you plagiarize in my course, you fail my course, and I will take it personally. Maybe that’s unreasonable, but that’s how I am. I thought I should tell you up front so that, if you can’t handle having a professor who’s such a hardass, you can explore your alternatives.

So far, none of my students have every run screaming from this talk. Some of them even nod approvingly. The students who labor to write their papers honestly likely feel there’s something unjust about classmates who sidestep all that labor by cheating.

But students can still fully comprehend your explanation of how you view plagiarism, how personally you’ll take it, how vigorously you’ll punish it … and plagiarize.

They may even deny it to your face for 30 additional seconds after they recognize that you have them dead to rights (since given the side-by-side comparison of their assignment and the uncited source, they would need to establish psychic powers for there to be any plausible explanation besides plagiarism). And then they’ll explain that they were really pressed for time, and they need a good grade (or a passing grade) in this course, and they felt trapped by circumstances, so even though of course they know what they did is wrong, they made one bad decision, and their parents will kill them, and … isn’t there some way we could make this go away? They feel so bad now that they promise they’ve learned their lesson.

Here, I think we need to recognize that there is a relevant difference between saying you have learned a lesson and actually learning that lesson.

Indeed, one of the reasons that my university’s office of judicial affairs asks instructors to report all cases of plagiarism and cheating no matter what sanctions we apply to them (including no sanctions) is so there will be a record of whether a particular offense is really the first offense. Students who plagiarize may also lie about whether they have a record of doing so and being caught doing it. If the offenses are spread around — in different classes with different professors in different departments — you might be able to score first-time leniency half a dozen times.

Does that sound cynical? From where I sit, it’s just realistic. But this “realistic” point of view (which others in the teaching trenches share) is bound to make us tougher on the students who actually do make a single bad decision, suspecting that they might be committed cheaters, too.

Keeping the information about plagiarists secret rather than sharing it through the proper channels, in other words, can hurt students who could be helped.

There have been occasions, it should be noted, when frustrated instructors warned students that they would name and shame plagiarists, only to find (after following through on that warning) that they had run afoul of FERPA. Among other things, FERPA gives students (18 or older) some measure of control about who gets to see their academic records. If a professor announces to the world — or even to your classmates — that you’ve failed a the class for plagiarizing, information from your academic records has arguably been shared without your consent.

Still, it’s hard not to feel that plagiarism is breaking trust not just with the professor but with the learning community. Does that learning community have an interest in flagging the bad actors? If you know there are plagiarists among your classmates but you don’t know who they are, does this create a situation where you can’t trust anyone? If all traces of punishment — or of efforts at rehabilitation — are hidden behind a veil of privacy, is the reasonable default assumption that people are generally living within the rules and that the rules are being enforced against the handful of violations … or is it that people are getting away with stuff?

Is there any reasonable role for the community in punishment and in rehabilitation of plagiarism?

To some, of course, this talk of harms to learning communities will seem quaint. If you see your education as an individual endeavor rather than a team sport, your classmates may as well be desks (albeit desks whose grades may be used to determine the curve). What you do, or don’t do, in your engagement with the machinery that dispenses your education (or at least your diploma) may be driven by your rational calculations about what kind of effort you’re willing to put into creating the artifacts you need to present in exchange for grades.

The artifacts that require writing can be really time-consuming to produce de novo. The writing process, after all, is hard. People who write for a living complain of writer’s block. Have you ever heard anyone complain about Google-block? Plagiarism, in other words, is a huge time-saver, not least because it relies on skills most college students already have rather than ones they need to develop to any significant extent.

Here, I’d like to offer a modest proposal for students unwilling to engage the writing process: don’t.

Take a stand for what you believe in! Don’t lurk in the shadows pretending to knuckle under to the man by turning in essays and term papers that give the appearance that you wrote them. Instead, tell your professors that writing anything original for their assignments is against your principles. Then take your F and wear it as a badge of honor!

When all those old-timey professors who fetishize the value of clear writing, original thought, and proper citation of sources die out — when your generation is running the show — surely your principled stand will be vindicated!

And, in the meantime, your professors can spend their scarce time helping your classmates who actually want to learn to write well and uphold rudimentary rules of scholarship.

Really, it’s win-win.

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In the interests of full-disclosure — and of avoiding accusations of self-plagiarism — I should note that this essay draws on a number of posts I have written in the past about plagiarism in academic contexts.

The purpose of a funding agency (and how that should affect its response to misconduct).

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In the “Ethics in Science” course I regularly teach, students spend a good bit of time honing their ethical decision-making skills by writing responses to case studies. (A recent post lays out the basic strategy we take in approaching these cases.) Over the span of the semester, my students’ responses to the cases give me pretty good data about the development of their ethical decision-making.

From time to time, they also advance claims that make me say, “Hmmm …”

Here’s one such claim, recently asserted in response to a case in which the protagonist, a scientist serving on a study section for the NIH (i.e., a committee that ranks the merit of grant proposals submitted to the NIH for funding), has to make a decision about how to respond when she detects plagiarism in a proposal:

The main purpose of the NIH is to ensure that projects with merit get funded, not to punish scientists for plagiarism.

Based on this assertion, the student argued that it wasn’t clear that the study section member had to make an official report to the NIH about the plagiarism.

I think the claim is interesting, though I think maybe we would do well to unpack it a little. What, for instance, counts as a project with merit?

Is it enough that the proposed research would, if successful, contribute a new piece of knowledge to our shared body of scientific knowledge? Does the anticipated knowledge that the research would generate need to be important, and if so, according to what metric? (Clearly applicable to a pressing problem? Advancing our basic understanding of some part of our world? Surprising? Resolving an ongoing scientific debate?) Does the proposal need to convey evidence that the proposers have a good chance at being successful in conducting the research (because they have the scientific skills, the institutional resources, etc.)?

Does plagiarism count as evidence against merit here?

Perhaps we answer this question differently if we think what should be evaluated is the proposal rather than the proposer. Maybe the proposed research is well-designed, likely to work, and likely to make an important contribution to knowledge in the field — even if the proposer is judged lacking in scholarly integrity (because she seems not to know how properly to cite the words or ideas of others, or not to care to do so if she knows how).

But, one of the expectations of federal funders like the NIH is that scientists whose research is funded will write up the results and share them in the scientific literature. Among other things, this means that one of the scientific skills that a proposer will need to see a project through to completion (including publishing the results) successfully is the ability to write without running afoul of basic standards of honest scholarship. A paper which communicates important results while also committing plagiarism will not bring glory to the NIH for funding the researcher.

More broadly, the fact that something (like detecting or punishing plagiarism) is not a primary goal does not mean it is not a goal that might support the primary goal. To the extent that certain kinds of behavior in proposing research might mark a scientist as a bad risk to carry out research responsibly, it strikes me as entirely appropriate for funding agencies to flag those behaviors when they see them — and also to share that information with other funding agencies.

As well, to the extent that an agency like the NIH might punish a scientist for plagiarism, the kind of punishment it imposes is generally barring that scientist from eligibility for funding for a finite number of years. In other words, the punishment amounts to “You don’t get our money, and you don’t get to ask us for money again for the next N years.” To me, this punishment doesn’t look like it’s disproportional, and it doesn’t look like imposing it on a plagiarist grant proposer diverges wildly from the main goal of ensuring that projects with merit get funded.

But, as always, I’m interested in what you all think about it.