List of Plagiarism Controversies - Academia

Academia

• The 11th-century Muslim scholar Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi considered the Book of Animals of Al-Jahiz (d. 869) to be "little more than a plagiarism" of Aristotle's Kitāb al-Hayawān, a charge that was once levelled against Aristotle himself with regard to a certain "Asclepiades of Pergamum". Later scholars have noted that there was only a limited Aristotelian influence in al-Jahiz's work, and that al-Baghdadi may have been unacquainted with Aristotle's work.
• David Copolov, psychiatrist and Pro Vice Chancellor of Monash University was found to have plagiarized from Oliver Wendell Holmes in his valedictory address in 2012. The incident was reported in the journal Nature.
• James A. Mackay, a Scottish historian, was forced to withdraw all copies of his biography of Alexander Graham Bell from circulation in 1998 because he plagiarized the last major work on the subject, a 1973 work. Also accused of plagiarizing material on biographies of Mary, Queen of Scots, Andrew Carnegie, and Sir William Wallace, he was forced to withdraw his next work, on John Paul Jones, in 1999 for an identical reason.
• Marks Chabedi, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, plagiarized his doctoral thesis. He used a work written by Kimberly Lanegran at the University of Florida and copied it nearly verbatim before submitting it to The New School. When Lanegran discovered this, she launched an investigation into Chabedi. He was fired from his professorship, and The New School revoked his Ph.D.
• Historian Stephen Ambrose has been criticized for incorporating passages from the works of other authors into many of his books. He was first accused in 2002 by two writers for copying portions about World War II bomber pilots from Thomas Childers's The Wings of Morning in his book The Wild Blue. After Ambrose admitted to the errors, the New York Times found further unattributed passages, and "Mr. Ambrose again acknowledged his errors and promised to correct them in later editions."
• Norman Finkelstein has charged Alan Dershowitz with committing plagiarism by using material from Joan Peters's 1984 book From Time Immemorial in his book The Case for Israel, without giving proper credit. See "Dershowitz–Finkelstein affair".
• Author Doris Kearns Goodwin interviewed author Lynne McTaggart in her 1987 book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, and she used passages from McTaggart's book about Kathleen Kennedy. In 2002, when the similarities between Goodwin's and McTaggart's books became public, Goodwin stated that she had an understanding that citations would not be required for all references, and that extensive footnotes already existed. Many doubted her claims, and she was forced to resign from the Pulitzer Prize board.
• Mathematician and computer scientist Dănuţ Marcu claims to have published over 383 original papers in various scientific publications. A number of his recent papers have been shown to be exact copies of papers published earlier by other authors.
• A University of Colorado investigating committee found Ethnic Studies professor and activist Ward Churchill guilty of multiple counts of plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification. After the Chancellor recommended Churchill's dismissal to the Board of Regents, Churchill was fired on 24 July 2007.
• Physicist and Vice Chancellor of Kumaon University, India, Prof. B.S. Rajput resigned in 2003 after he and a student were found guilty of plagiarism of a paper (which formed part of the student's thesis).
• In 2007 researchers of Anna University Chennai in Madras published a paper in the Journal of Materials Science, an exact copy of an article from the University of Linköping published in PNAS
• In April 2008, James Twitchell, a professor of literature at the University of Florida, admitted having plagiarized and falsified the works of multiple authors.
• In March 2010, Manuel V. Pangilinan, a prominent Filipino businessman and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Ateneo de Manila University, was found to have given a commencement speech that contained numerous lines lifted from speeches of other prominent public figures. Pangilinan offered to resign from his post at the university, which was rejected by the Board of Trustees, a move which garnered controversy.
• In March 2010, Prof. Wang Hui of Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Tsinghua University, was charged by Wang Binbin, a professor of literature from Nanjing University, of plagiarism found in his doctoral dissertation on Lu Xun. Wang Binbin also sampled one chapter in Wang Hui's four-volume magnum opus The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, and accused Wang Hui of abuse of the sources.