The mere mention of the term “plagiarism” can strike fear into the heart of an academic editor; likewise “attribution” and “citation”. Editors of fiction and poetry can take no great comfort, either: our Nemesis might be found in the subgenre fan fiction and the saying that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”.

So, what exactly is literary appropriation, and what is its relationship to plagiarism?

A synonym of “stealing,” swiping is a vernacular term in the comics industry and fandom used to identify and designate redrawn or traced copies of particular images and panels. As such, swiping constitutes a surprising mode of graphic transmission that implicates the gathering of particular images and their hand-drawn reproductions. The chapter recovers a history of the practice at the hand of a few smaller cases that highlight the variability of swiping as an appreciation and evaluation of copying, only to move to the central case study focusing on Charles Burns’s appropriations of “old” comics panels, mostly from pre-Code romance and horror comic books to Tintin. It is interested not only in how Burns redraws comic book images but also in how he constructs and publicly shares archives of reusable images that are constantly redistributed in his work, especially in his small-press publications. The chapter argues that Burns’s citational tactics function less as postmodern rewriting than as an adaptation of swiping practices from comic book culture, a transmission of a way of redrawing images.

Fraud in medical research is a broad term that encompasses several different misdemeanors: falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, and deception. The scale of medical research fraud isn’t negligible, either. While reliable estimates are hard to come by - since people are unlikely to implicate themselves - studies suggest that the true rate of fraud among published studies lies somewhere between 0.01% and 0.4%. Chapter 17 discusses why people choose to commit fraud in medical research and how the scientific system can incentivize this type of behaviour. Additionally, the chapter explores how medical fraud ultimately affects the rate and direction of medical progress through mechanisms such as the squandering of resources and a loss of trust. The chapter concludes by discussing how we can dissuade future misconduct in medical research.

John Gerard’s Herball of 1597 was remarkably successful: it was twice reprinted, and it remained an authoritative botanical textbook through the eighteenth century. Copies of the book were regularly bequeathed by name in wills, and as we have seen, poets such as John Milton profitably mined its descriptions for details about plants and their uses. Yet, despite the evidence of Gerard’s wide renown among his contemporaries, his reputation as a herbalist has suffered from accusations of plagiarism that have plagued discussions of his work since the publication of the book’s revised second edition in 1633. This chapter explains how this narrative about Gerard’s 1597 Herball came about, paying close attention to the perspectives of the volume’s publishers to reveal that the logic of the traditional account of Gerard as a plagiarist makes little sense in the context of early modern herbal publication.

This chapter broadens Foucault’s ideas of the author-function to include such textual progenitors as stationers, printers, and booksellers. It argues that authorship is a mode of self-fashioning and highlights the ways that the sociology of truth demands that others recognize one’s authorial and expert claims over a knowledge domain like natural history. It explains why Adrian Johns’s concept of stationer “credit” is of limited use and why his conflation of plagiarism and piracy confuses two separate issues of impropriety that undergo radical changes in the sixteenth century. It suggests making a “bibliographic turn” to remedy Johns’s interpretation of Steven Shapin’s “social history” and better account for bibliographic scholarship.

Authors are informed about the many problems of unethical practices in scientific publishing, notably plagiarism, duplication, multiple submission, fabrications, conflicts of interest and others. They are also pointed to places where they can get help in dealing with these issues.

Interpreting results correctly and communicating them honestly are vital parts of what scientists do. Incorrect interpretation of data often results from avoidable statistical mistakes. Common pitfalls arise from abuse of significance testing, misunderstanding of correlations and overgeneralisation of findings. Publishing peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals is the primary means by which researchers communicate their findings to other scientists. A scientific paper has an established basic format comprising title, abstract, introduction, methods, results and discussion. Open Science practices are an important part of the modern publication process. Non-technical (lay) summaries and press releases are tools for communicating behavioural research to journalists and the public. All science involves potential conflicts of interest, and their influence on scientific communication is an unresolved cause for concern. Several organisations oversee the integrity of science, but ultimately it is the personal responsibility of each individual researcher to behave with openness and integrity.

This chapter focuses on romans à clef of the Harlem Renaissance. It argues that Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (1932) and Richard Bruce Nugent’s Gentleman Jigger (2008), read together, foreground the tensions between originality and derivativeness, individual “genius” and collaboration that were being negotiated more broadly in the modernist art of the period. On the one hand, both Infants of the Spring and Jigger are invested in models of artistry that valorize “individuality” and “genius” over “standardization” and derivativeness. On the other hand, the texts themselves – which explicitly address the question of plagiarism through differently inflected scenes describing the same event – suggest that a model of authorship or artistry that does not accommodate collaboration, borrowing, and even outright theft is gravely deficient.

This chapter explains the evolution of ‘hard-word’ dictionaries in English lexicography during the seventeenth century. Through a discussion of how lexicography and natural philosophy were emerging and how scientific methods were being applied to language, it traces the development of dictionaries and what kinds of information went into them. We see that the first monolingual dictionaries were lists of words; subsequently, those lists included short definitions of terms borrowed from other languages. Soon, dictionaries provided definitions of technical terms and jargon – the ‘hard words’ – and finally, dictionaries developed into encyclopedic reference works that added information on the history and development of the language and practical uses of a dictionary for words in general use. Last, the chapter details a famous case of lexicographical plagiarism to present how the concept of authorship has changed over time.

This chapter considers the appearance of the first monolingual dictionary of English at the beginning of the seventeenth century and its forebears in the late sixteenth century. Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall, a so-called ‘hard words’ dictionary, was first published in 1604, and was preceded by a list published as an addendum to the main predecessor, Edmund Coote’s The English Schoole-Maister of 1596. Cawdrey’s work was addressed to a clientele which was literate but less than fully educated, and in particular, women who were sufficiently educated to teach others, especially in their own households, and to promulgate a religious agenda. Coote’s book was essentially a teaching manual aimed not merely at students, but at the teachers themselves, and was based on a clearly articulated method. These two dictionaries have a close relationship, Cawdrey employing a large percentage of Coote’s entries. This chapter explores that relationship in detail. While many entries are taken over largely unaltered, there are also numerous changes, including expansions, the provision of explanatory material, and new definitions. There are also many deletions from Coote, and the incorporation of terms from other works.

The Irish poetry of the romantic age is dominated by its best-known figure, Thomas Moore. While Moore claimed that his songs were responsible for saving the national literary and musical culture, there were, of course, many other writers producing poetry in differing modes, languages, and registers. This chapter begins and ends with Moore’s considerable achievements, but it also deals with three issues that preoccupied Irish poetic and cultural debate in the period and after: translation, authenticity, and quality. The debate gains its first focus in the work of Charlotte Brooke, but continues through Moore’s contact with music in the collections of Edward Bunting. This period was also one of considerable historical moment, and the chapter also addresses poetry written out of the contact with French revolutionary ideas, the United Irishmen, 1798, and Union. Among poets considered are also William Drennan, Mary Tighe, James Orr, and Thomas Dermody, writing in English and Ulster Scots as well as in contact with the Irish-language tradition, mock-epic, and the oriental.

Communication takes many forms. This chapter offers guidance for presenting work in a poster or talk, as well as for writing a research article for publication.

A conception of the Argentine literary tradition as one built around creative misreading can be directly linked with Borges. Leading writers Cesar Aira and Ricardo Piglia engage with Borges in a similar manner both to modify and to write themselves into a new Argentine literary tradition. In essays including ’Homage to Roberto Arlt’ and ’Ideology and Fiction in Borges’, Piglia utilizes a reading of Borges in terms of ’erroneous attribution’ to politicize his work and situate himself as Borges’s true descendent. For his part, Aira’s rejection of Borges in his 1993 essay ’Exoticism’ is not as absolute as it appears; an earlier essay of 1981, ’Who is the Greatest Argentine Writer?’, marks him as Borges’s heir.

This chapter explores the place of new technologies in writing instruction and provides an overview of its main uses, implications and practical applications for writing teachers.