scholarly writing – Page 8 – Love Your Dissertation

January 12, 2017January 27, 2018

All about plagiarism for dissertators whose backs are against the wall

Do you know what plagiarism is? Are you thinking to yourself, plagiar-what? Is that some sort of disease? (Uh-oh, said the editor.) If you aren’t familiar with the term plagiarism, read this post—it may save your career.

What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism is the unattributed use of someone else’s words, thoughts, ideas, and concepts (Plagiarism.org, 2014). You can call it borrowing, but essentially, plagiarism is stealing. Specifically, to plagiarize means

to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own
to use (another’s production) without crediting the source
to commit literary theft
to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source. (Merriam Webster online, n.d.)

In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else’s work and lying about it afterward. Whatever you borrowed, if you don’t say clearly who you borrowed it from and provide a usable link or reference back to the original source, you run the risk of being accused of plagiarism, which can get you expelled from your doctoral program. Yep. Expelled. Kind of a big deal.

Examples of plagiarism

Turning in someone else’s work as your own
Copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit
Failing to put a quotation in quotation marks or “cherrypicking” parts of a quotation, taking the words out of context
Giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation
Changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit
Copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not

How plagiarism happens

Plagiarism happens. Usually it is unintentional. Think about this scenario and tell me it hasn’t happened to you: In rabid researcher mode, you comb through multiple databases, download hundreds of articles, follow umpteen threads on Google Scholar, dig into Ebrary and Google Books … you suck up information like a kid with a milkshake, gloating with glee when you find some particularly juicy or seminal article that some kind soul uploaded to the Web so you didn’t have to fork out a fortune to buy the book. Yum.

You copy, paste, and paraphrase text and ideas into your paper, immersed in your quest, relishing your progress. After a few hours of happy hunting, it suddenly dawns on you that you haven’t been citing your sources. In fact, you haven’t even kept track of where you found some of those obscure articles. Were they in a database? Did you get there through EBSCOHost or ProQuest? Or was it an article on a publisher’s website? Argh! Curses!

Now you are at a crossroads. You have two choices. One is long, tedious, boring, and frustrating; the other is short and relatively painless, but could lead to some serious consequences later, if anyone found out what you did. I am sure you know I’m talking about plagiarism.

Why dissertators feel tempted to cheat

The right thing to do

The right thing to do is to go back through your process, find all those sources you accessed, and record the citation information carefully, completely, and accurately, making sure to include robust URLs and dois (digital object identifers) and avoiding university proxies that no one but you or your fellow classmates can access. And then, next time you go searching for sources, you vow to keep track as you go along, like the responsible scholar you are. Right? Then you cite your sources in your paper like a citation maniac! (I tend to follow the maxim of when in doubt, cite. I figure it is better to CYA (cover your ass) than get in trouble for plagiarism later.)

The wrong thing to do

The wrong thing to do is failing to include citations in your paper, or perhaps worse, making up citations that might or might not relate to the words you paraphrased, hoping that no one will check.

As an editor, I don’t consider it my job to make sure your citations are accurate in terms of content. I check format, but as far as content goes, I have to trust your scholarly integrity. However, when I edit paragraph after paragraph of content with nary a citation, or maybe with one citation at the end of the paragraph, my plagiarism antenna pokes out of my head, and I start sniffing around for more signs of trouble. I go through the references and check that (a) they exist, (b) they are accurate, and (c) they are reasonably accessible to a typical reader.

Most of you know that when you include direct quotations, you must include the page number of the content. This is so readers can find the quote and read more about the subject. Reviewers can check to see if you took someone’s words out of context. It happens occasionally that dissertators either misinterpret or outright butcher someone else’s thoughts in their efforts to paraphrase. I don’t check your sources to make sure you paraphrased them accurately. However, if I spot a quotation that is not cited, I will try to find the page number. If I happen to notice that your interpretation of the authors’ words was taken out of context and spun to suit your argument, I will leave you a polite comment in the margin of your paper, warning you about the dangers of plagiarism.

Excuses for plagiarism

Sometimes plagiarism is intentional, but I believe dissertators rarely do it with malicious intent. When you are tired and the deadline is near, the effort to find citation information can be overwhelmed by the desire to get the paper done and submitted. Good enough is good enough for now; perfection can come later. Am I right? Ah, the slippery slope.

If you build good writing and research habits early in your academic career, it will be easier for you when the deadlines are clamoring and the pressure to cut corners is intense.

I don’t usually interact with the dissertators whose papers I edit. However, I was a teacher at a career college for 10 years. I’ve heard many excuses for why students feel compelled to plagiarize. Here are a few:

I tried (unskillfully) to put it into my own words.

Hey, no shame. We aren’t born with writing skills. We have to acquire them through practice. Learning how to write well is not like shopping for a toaster at Wal-Mart (darn). Academic writing is challenging even for good writers. Read lots of articles and dissertations to learn how other writers paraphrase and cite.

I forgot to copy the source.

It takes some practice to develop a system for managing your source information so you can create your citations. Read some tips in REASON 22 in my book. Make this system your habit. It is a lot easier to manage your sources as you go along, rather than wait until the end to figure out which source applies to which bit of text in your paper.

I didn’t know it was wrong.

It seems like everything on the Internet is free. We download movies and music. We copy pictures and text. We forward stories and webpages to our friends, we post them on Facebook. What we may not know is that many things on the Internet are considered “intellectual property.” That means it belongs to someone else, not to us. We are stealing!

Consequences of plagiarism

Plagiarism has consequences. If you’ve done it before, you might feel like you dodged a bullet. You might say, never again! Or you might say, I got away with it once, I probably can again. Ask yourself:

Will I likely get caught?
What are the potential consequences if I get caught?
Who do I harm?
Can I live with myself?

Only you can decide. However, plagiarizing your dissertation can come back to haunt you years after you did the crime. Here are two examples to nudge you in the right direction:

In Germany, defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was forced to resign when it was discovered he had plagiarized large parts of his thesis; his university stripped him of his doctorate (Pidd, 2011).
In 2013, German education minister Annette Schavan lost her doctorate when it was discovered she had failed to properly cite other researchers’ work in her dissertation (Brumfield, 2013).

I’m pretty sure plagiarism isn’t unique to German scholars. Imagine working so hard for so many years to earn your doctorate, only to have it stripped from you. All that time and money down the drain. Think about that before you decide to cut corners on citing your sources.

If you want to earn the title of scholar, you need to do your best to follow the academic rules of the road. Writing a dissertation may be one of the hardest things you will ever do. The value of your work is diminished in direct proportion to the level of disregard you have for properly citing your sources. That was a convoluted sentence, wasn’t it? Let me put it this way: Cheaters may gain in the short run, but the honorable dissertator wins out in the end.

Check out plagiarism.org [http://www.plagiarism.org/] for lots of information about plagiarism, presented by WriteCheck, a service designed to help scholarly writers avoid plagiarism.

Sources

Brumfield, B. (2013, February 6). German education minister loses Ph.D. over plagiarized thesis. CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/06/world/europe/german-minister-plagiarism/

Merriam Webster. (n.d.). Plagiarism. Retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plagiarize

Pidd, H. (2011). German defence minister resigns in PhD plagiarism row: Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg had been stripped of doctorate by University of Bayreuth. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/01/german-defence-minister-resigns-plagiarism

Plagiarism.org. (2014). What is plagiarism? Retrieved from http://www.plagiarism.org/plagiarism-101/what-is-plagiarism

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If you need some help figuring out why you can’t get your dissertation proposal approved, check out my book.

November 26, 2016November 26, 2016

Narrow the scope of your project to get your dissertation proposal approved

Scope is the definition of the edges of our study. We could study the whole world. Hey, why stop there? We could study the entire universe! That would be a broad scope for a social scientist. I don’t recommend biting off that much topic. In fact, I suggest narrowing the scope of your project—a lot.

Scope is what you have after you’ve set your delimitations. What are delimitations? Hey, thanks for asking. Delimitations are restrictions we purposely implement to reduce the breadth and width our study. For example, we might delimit our study to one local geographical area or to one subset of a population.

Here’s my story. When I set about studying academic quality in for-profit vocational programs, I planned to talk to students, faculty, administrators, and employers. After some iterations (and replacements of committee members), I settled on a phenomenological approach to exploring academic quality through the perspectives of these four groups. How cool, I thought!

“Not so fast,” said my new Chair. “Do you realize what a monumental data analysis task you are creating for yourself?”

“I can do it,” I stubbornly replied.

I was enthusiastic until I started writing up my research plan in my dissertation proposal. As I forged through my plan, I began to see what I nightmare I was in for if I had four groups to compare. I was running out of time in my program. How on earth would I be able to synthesize the results of qualitative interviews from four groups of stakeholders in less than six months?

When I hesitantly suggested we cut out employers, my Chair said, Why not just study faculty? As long as you can explain why they alone are being studied, one group is sufficient for a doctoral project. Hallelujah. I made the decision to cut back to just one group, faculty. It was the moment when things began to fall into place.

I narrowed the scope even further. I could have interviewed faculty who taught at private nonprofit and public institutions, in addition to faculty who taught at for-profit institutions. That would have been a different study. I delimited my study to only for-profit faculty. I could have tried to find faculty in different cities. I didn’t have the resources to do that, so I delimited my study to only one metropolitan region. I could have done a mixed-methods survey to expose the definitions of academic quality generated by my small qualitative sample to a larger quantitative sample. That project was too big for me, and more to the point, not necessary, so I delimited my study to one qualitative approach with one small sample of faculty.

If you think about it, in the sense I just described, our problem and research questions are delimitations, and those delimitations define the scope of our study. We identify the boundaries we’ve placed on our research in terms of who we are studying (our sample) and how we are studying them (our methodology and method). Your reviewers will likely ask you to justify your delimitations. Why did you choose that place, those people, rather than other places and other people?

Too broad a scope is a problem I often see in the papers I edit. I get it. It’s tempting to want to get your arms around all facets of a problem. It’s like we feel obligated to throw in the kitchen sink to earn the doctorate. You may want to challenge yourself, take the road less traveled, yada yada. That’s great, and we applaud you, you trail blazer, you. But just so you know: It’s not necessary to earn the degree. Your narrow, well-defined study will be more likely to receive approval than a vast panoramic study of the entire Chinese supply chain, or the U.S. public school system, or whatever.

Reviewers don’t always catch a poorly defined scope. Here’s an example. Let’s say you want to study the experiences of Oregon high school students who failed the high school exit exam. Perhaps your own experience with racial discrimination prompted your interest in the topic. You plan to describe the test failure experiences of students of color, disabled students, and English language learners (ELLs). However, in your literature review, you focus primarily on the group with whom you most strongly identify: the students of color and barely mention the disabled and ELL students. Then, in the last few paragraphs, you add another group to your plan: low socioeconomic status students, without remembering to mention them in your problem, purpose, and research questions. It’s so easy to fall prey to scope creep!

That’s why I recommend, when you describe the problem for a doctoral dissertation, keep the focus and scope tight and narrow. Later you can study other groups. If you didn’t limit the scope in your proposal, and somehow that got by your reviewers, you can still attempt to manage the scope when you write your manuscript by defining your terms and describing your study’s limitations with strict clarity.

If you need some help, check out my book.

November 15, 2016November 15, 2016

The most common dissertation proposal problems

Here are the most common proposal problems I see repeatedly as I am editing people’s proposals and dissertations. These problems are most likely to motivate reviewers to reject your dissertation proposal. If you address these before you submit your paper, you are more likely to receive a happy outcome.

Lack of alignment

By far, the most common problem I see in proposals and dissertations is a lack of alignment between the problem, purpose, research questions, and methodology/methods. Alignment means all these elements logically flow from one to the next. This is such an important requirement that I devote an entire chapter to it in my book (see REASON 14).

Inconsistent terminology

From the variety of ways people write about the core elements of their project (the core elements I’m referring to are the problem, purpose, research questions, and methodology/methods), I get the feeling that we dissertators have a fear of being boring. However, this isn’t creative writing, and you are not an entertainer. Maybe you like to think you are the life of the party, but the purpose of your project is not to entertain your audience. I talk more about this problem in REASON 24.

Too many quotations

Uncertain researchers rely too heavily on other re-searchers’ words. Paraphrasing is an art you can master, and it’s worth practicing. A dissertation or proposal that is half quotes gives the impression the dissertator lacks critical thinking skills. Giant blocks of quoted text is a dead giveaway you don’t know what you are doing. Inordinate amounts of quoted material are red flags for reviewers. I address this problem in REASON 24.

Not enough citations

I hope you are familiar with the word plagiarism. Odds are, if you don’t cite your sources properly, you will soon learn what that word means—the hard way. Plagiarism is the unattributed use of someone else’s words, thoughts, ideas, and concepts. Whatever you borrowed, if you don’t say clearly who you borrowed it from and provide a usable reference back to the original source, you run the risk of being accused of plagiarism, which can get you expelled from your program. Yep. Expelled. Kind of a big deal. I talk more about this problem in REASON 22 and REASON 27.

Lack of compliance with a style guide

Did you know on top of everything else you have to contend with, you must comply with a specific set of style guidelines? Every field uses some sort of style guide. Medical dissertators will likely use AMA guidelines. If you are in the social sciences, you most likely will use the APA style manual. Style guides may seem arbitrary, but you need to find out which one your institution, department, or program uses, buy the manual, and study it. Find more on APA style guidelines in REASON 25.

Noncompliance with template

A few lucky dissertators attend programs at institutions where in terms of format, it’s the Wild West. Just about anything goes. Odds are very good you don’t go to one of those schools. Sorry. That means you must comply with some kind of structure and format. Getting Word to help and not hinder you in this task can make you want to tear out your remaining hair. Never fear. Help is in REASON 26.