Hi Jim,
Actually, this 'encouragement' can be much more subtle. It's when their
advisor looks up at them, sighs, and says "Can't you do better?" Since
they can't do better without taking a few more years of English writing
classes, they copy.
In Taiwan, at any rate, scientists are now being blacklisted from
Taiwan's National Science Council funding for various ethical problems,
including plagiarism. So, understanding of the problem has improved,
but the ability to solve the problem is still lagging behind. I tell my
students they are all English Handicapped, which means throughout their
career they will need extra time, effort, and money to write scientific
papers. This is a burden added to the problem we discussed last month:
gaining access to published papers.
CL
James Crants wrote:
Cara Lin,
I was trying to craft a good response to your questions, but I think I
should leave it to people with more experience publishing and editing than I
have. I'll just mention that the issue of Science I just received yesterday
has an article about blatant plagiarism in scientific papers and some of the
tools people use to detect it.
Unfortunately, it sounds like some Chinese scientists are being encouraged
by their local writing experts to copy papers on work similar to their own,
changing the details to fit their own research and results. The rationale
is that this allows them to present their original research in far better
English than they could manage if they were writing from scratch. I can
certainly sympathize with concerns about writing intelligently in a foreign
language, but it's really a shame that there are scientists being told to
produce papers in a way that will put a big black mark on their
international repuations.
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Cara Lin Bridgman [email protected]
P.O. Box 013 Shinjhuang http://megaview.com.tw/~caralin
Longjing Township http://www.BugDorm.com
Taichung County 43499
Taiwan Phone: 886-4-2632-5484
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