Short links

Thanks to a correspondent for combing Google News for these links:

• The International News (30 March 2014) reports that a professor in India Pakistan is being forced to retire on account of plagiarism in research articles he published:
  

  The Punjab University (PU) syndicate on Saturday, confirming plagiarism charges against the varsity’s Institute of Chemistry Prof Dr Zaid Mahmood, penalised him with forced retirement under the PEEDA Act. [...] Dr Zaid had been claiming that his research papers were published before 2007 and therefore they could not be made a subject of the inquiry as per the HEC’s plagiarism policy.

  As if just waiting a number of years somehow changes a plagiarism into a non-plagiarism. The article does not state if the papers are being retracted.
  
  
• The Guardian has a piece (21 March 2014) on how easy it is to plagiarize using the Internet, but also how easy it is to find people out:
  

  The act of uncovering and investigating acts of plagiarism is becoming easier by the day. Search engines, online plagiarism checkers (of varying quality) and the viral publicity opportunities afforded by social media all play their part. Plagiarism searches can be compelling, like addictive puzzles where positive results elicit mental fist-pumps of delight.

• The Times Higher Education notes (3 April 2014) that a senior sociologist, caught by a young PhD in plagiarizing from the Wikipedia, of all places, finds that rules about referencing don't apply to his scholarship:
  

  An eminent sociologist has claimed that high-quality scholarship does not depend on “obedience” to “technical” rules on referencing after a PhD student accused him of plagiarising from websites, including Wikipedia, in his latest book.
  
  Zygmunt Bauman, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Leeds, was responding to claims that he fails to clearly indicate that several passages in his 2013 book Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? are exact or near-exact quotations from the online encyclopedia and other web sources.

  Bauman tries to put the PhD student down by snorting that ideas aren't owned by anyone. But really, shouldn't every academic be able to clearly state what is from others? It does then rather save face when it turns out that something one is using from other people without attribution is just plain wrong...