By Paul Jump
Times Higher Education
Originally published August 20, 2015
Here are two excerpts:
Last year, Times Higher Education reported allegations that Zygmunt Bauman, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Leeds and often hailed as the world’s greatest living sociologist, had included several unacknowledged passages in his 2013 book Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? that were near-exact quotations from Wikipedia and other web resources. The book also allegedly included numerous passages from previous works written by Professor Bauman “without appropriate attribution”.
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They acknowledge that some academics do not regard self-plagiarism as a serious issue. But “by failing to indicate that substantial parts of his newly authored works are not in fact new, in any conventional sense of the term, but are instead copied from his earlier works, Bauman deceives his readers”, they say.
Both Professor Bauman and Polity, the publisher of many of his most recent books, declined to comment.
Irene Hames, an editorial and publishing consultant and a former journal editor and council member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, said that self-plagiarism – she preferred to call it “recycling” – was “a topic of considerable current discussion, confusion and varying viewpoints”.
The entire article is here.
