What’s an Academic Fraud?

I recently discovered I am an academic fraud. Now, I am sure there must be people out there whose immediate response is “of course you are”, “knew it” or “I am not surprised”, but I was.

Admittedly, what amounts to fraud when publishing as an academic isn’t always entirely clear to me – which, to some, is enough to be suspect (if not guilty-till-proven-innocent) already. I do get the extremes; I’m not that daft: If one writes up a truly new academic study giving the full account of the research underlying it, it ain’t fraud. If you make up the data – emulating the now infamous Diederik Stapel – it is. But sometimes in between, I am not always sure… Let me give you a few potential examples.

• Last month, at the Editorial Board Meeting of the Academy of Management Journal, the editor reported that the journal would now start screening every submitted article for plagiarism. The software turns up whether parts of the text have been copied from earlier publications, including articles by the same author (in a case of self-plagiarism). After this, a fellow board member asked “can we access the same software to pre-screen our own articles before submitting them?” There wasn’t a murmur or hint of discontent in the room following this question, but I found it strange and uneasy. If you copy a piece of text, then pre-screen it and the software tells you you would be found out, you rewrite it a bit plugging in a few synonyms here and there and then it is ok and no longer considered fraud and plagiarism?!

• Geert Hofstede, one of the most highly cited social scientists ever (citations are considered a signal of “impact” in our academic world, and I seem to remember him once telling me that he had more citations than Karl Marx…), became famous for developing dimensions of national cultural differences. He published these dimensions left-right-and-centre – in academic journals, magazines and books – which greatly contributed to their and his exposure. He nowadays would be covered in tar and feathers and chased out of the ivory tower for self-plagiarism?

• Situation A: PhD student A copies a paragraph leading up to one of his hypotheses from a working paper by someone else he found on the web, without citation. Situation B: PhD student B copies a summary of a previously published academic article from a third, published paper who summarised the same article. Situation C: likewise, but with a citation to that third article, but no quotation marks. Situation D: likewise, but with citation and quotation marks. Who should get kicked out of the programme? At London Business School we have already dealt with situations A and B (the students were chased out), and D of course, but I am left wondering what we’d do in situation C.

• An academic – and an obvious fan of the Matthew Effect – buys 20,000 followers on Twitter. Yes, if you didn’t know, buying (fake) twitter followers is possible and easy. In fact, yesterday, I learned it is as cheap as chips. Yesterday, the Sunday Times covered the tale of an aspiring English celebrity who bought about 20,000 followers on Twitter to boost her profile. It just cost her a few hundred pounds/dollars. And, in fact, it sort of worked; she did raise her profile. But when she was found out – which isn’t actually that easy – she was ridiculed and quickly chased back to the dubious and crowded ranks of the British B-celebrities. But what would we do? How would we react to an academic buying 20,000 “followers”? Tar and feathers or applause for bringing the Matthew Effect to practice?

I am – apparently – a shameless self-plagiarising fraud because I sometimes get approached by business magazines who say “we read your blog post X and would like to republish it in our magazine”. And if they’re half decent (even by business magazine standards), I tend to say “yes”… In fact, I sometimes make the suggestion myself; when some magazine asks me “would you like to write an article on X for our wonderful magazine?” I usually say “no (way), but chapter X from my book would suit you well. Feel free to republish that”. Some acknowledge it was previously published; some don’t.

And, frankly, I don’t really care, and I will probably do it again. If it is my work, my copy-right, the magazine is fully aware of it, and it doesn’t harm the reader (they will know if they’ve seen it before, and otherwise they probably didn’t, or they might suffer from an enviable dose of business magazine amnesia), I won’t fear or dodge the tar and feathers. In fact, who knows, you may have read this very same post before!