Fighting plagiarism and defending academic integrity

I first thought of doing a piece on stealing intellectual property when I started noticing my words being used without credit in others' articles and blogs months back. I know that when information seeps into one's mind and becomes knowledge, it is sometimes impossible to trace the origin of an idea or thought. But when I see large chunks of my sentences literally copied and spliced into another's work then I know it was no accident.

This can be both maddening and deflating to writers and academics who make their living off their thoughts and words.

I have some experience of dealing with my academic work being stolen during my undergraduate career as well. At the end of my senior year at UNC Wilmington a few classmates and I finished our human osteology finals early and left them in stacks on the professor's desk, along with our final course assignments, while the rest of the class finished their exams. After I left the building, one of the students was allowed to head down to the computer lab to print out the remainder of his materials for the class. Ttwo of my osteology lab partners entered the lab and found this student furiously copying all my measurements and answers. He had taken my course materials off the desk when he turned in his exam and took them to the lab to plagiarise my results and conclusions. My partners confronted the student and got my materials back to the professor. Who knows, he probably would have thrown away my papers and turned his in, leaving me with an incomplete submission one week before graduation.

Recently, I inadvertently caught two students who were posting on Twitter a public conversation about cheating on a college cultural anthropology class' coursework. I wanted to let them know that hashtagging (making searchable) a request for anthropologists to contact you if they "want to make some money" for doing your coursework probably isn't the smartest way to go about cheating in college. Not only can anyone see everything you put out on the internet, but we all judge your character by what we see.

It wasn't my intention to ruin anyone's name or academic career when I posted this:

But I did want the involved parties to know that someone was watching and disapproved of the violations.

There were a number of tweets back and forth between @JDagger18 and @BeatrixKiddo27 on the logistics and monetary compensation of the latter student doing the former's cultural anthropology assignments and exams. Well, my Twitter followers (an awesome group indeed) took this and ran with it! I had a number of people retweet the message and this generated a lot of comment.

Business anthropology & Innovation. My status: talking ethnography ...

Hello there. Pedro Oliveira, here, Portuguese psychologist and anthropologist, recently back to my home country. I am writing from a country where there is barely any expression of applied ethnographic work to corporations. At the moment, I am trying to push forward the area of consumer ethnography in Portugal while looking for opportunities to further my experience abroad. Welcome to this blog. The International Journal of Business Anthropology is a double blind peer reviewed journal focusing upon business and economic anthropology sponsored by the College of Sociology and Anthropology, Sun Yat-Sen University, China, the Faculty of Social Science, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and published by the North American Business Press (NABP) biannually. Given the rapid growth of business anthropology a journal dedicated to the field is much needed. Business and economic anthropology uses qualitative and ethnographic methods as an alternative to more formal methodologies, Specific tools include participant observation, informal and structured interviews, and other “naturalistic”, informal, and face to face methods of investigation. Business anthropologists play a key role in developing culturally sensitive policies and strategies in a world that increasingly typified by cross-cultural contact (...) NABP publishes seven academic journals. The acceptance rate of NABP journals is less than twenty percent. The journals are indexed by UMI-Proquest-ABI Inform, EBSCOhost, GoogleScholar, and listed with Cabell's Directory, Ulrich's Listing of Periodicals, and Bowkers Publishing Resources. NABP journals are affirmed as scholarly research outlets by the following business school accrediting bodies: AACSB, ACBSP, IACBE & EQUIS. (For more information consult : http://www.na-businesspress.com/) We are always looking for good manuscripts. We encourage practitioners, students, community members, and faculty from all disciplines to submit articles. The Editors and one or more anonymous peer reviewers will review the manuscript prior to its acceptance for publication. In addition to research and academic articles, we feature case studies, commentaries and reviews.

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