A national debate around plagiarism has been sparked in India following accusations made against writer Rajiv Malhotra. Here, Swati Dhingra challenges the notion that plagiarism increases societal welfare. She argues that it is not hard to cite, and that presenting someone else’s work as your own is unegalitarian in the increasingly competitive academic world

Dhingra, Swati

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2015-7-24Time to join the war on the error of plagiarismblogs.lse.ac.uk /southasia/2015/07/24/time-to-join-the-war-on-the-error-of-plagiarism/A national debate around plagiarism has been sparked in India following accusations made against writerRajiv Malhotra. Here, Swati Dhingra challenges the notion that plagiarism increases societalwelfare. She argues that it is not hard to cite, and that presenting someone else’s work as your ownis unegalitarian in the increasingly competitive academic world.Earlier this month, historian Richard Fox Young charged an influential Indian-American writer ofplagiarism. The writer, Rajiv Malhotra, has written four books on Hinduism, and argues that the wayHinduism is taught in the west denigrates its traditions. Young posted extracts from Malhotra’sbooks revealing that Malhotra had apparently plagiarised material from various books, particularlyAndrew Nicholson’s book Unifying Hinduism [i]. This was followed by several web posts by well-known author,Ananya Vajpeyi, calling fellow scholars, writers and academics to join the war on the error of plagiarism.There have been endless posts on the matter and the plagiarism and the discussion has grown into a nationaldebate (see for example here). Being an economist, I will keep the moral question aside. Yes, of course, you shouldgive credit to the original thinker, that would be the right thing to do. I want to ask instead in economic parlance: doesplagiarism increase societal welfare? If people could freely steal ideas, wouldn’t it enrich the body of knowledge,through freer flow of ideas. Then in the grand scheme of things, plagiarism should be fine? I am going to give tworeasons why this is not true and, why plagiarism requires corrective action.First, plagiarism at best means that the writer is lazy and the work is shoddy – the writer couldn’t even be botheredto reference what’s incorporated. Free flow of ideas would happen just as easily if the original writer’s name isadded. Every word processing program now comes with a footnote or bibliography feature, so this is a trivial task. Infact, citing others is great because they even help you with your dirty laundry. The computer scientists know this alltoo well. The free software movement lets a programmer copy other people’s work and modify it. As the codereferences the contributors’ names, programmers can ask the original contributors for help with any unanticipatedglitches with the code. My co-authors and I have written successfully to several contributors to clarify or fix issueswith their code and ours, so there are organic improvements to the body of knowledge all the time.Second, plagiarism is unegalitarian because the plagiarising self-proclaimed pundits benefit at the expense oftypically junior academics. It takes two hours to re-hash a piece of scholarly work whose original author probablyspent two years doing the necessary research behind it. Academic jobs are getting harder and harder to come byand basically until most young academics write a book or `become’ a pundit or consultant later in their career, theyare stuck with at least ten years of stress scrambling for tenure at a job that pays relatively little [ii]. Each citationcounts and plagiarism of your original piece can be absolutely devastating, especially if it happens before you haveformally published your work in a journal.To sum up, it’s painless to cite people and doesn’t really take away from the glamor of being a thinker. Reputationsmatter and we need to name and shame people who plagiarise so that they don’t drive out the less connectedoriginal researchers. But most importantly, a systemic change is needed because plagiarism is rampant and comeswith few penalties. For instance, 24% of responding editors to a survey of economics journals said they hadencountered at least one case of plagiarism in a typical year. Yet less than 19% of responding journals had a formalpolicy regarding plagiarism (Enders and Hoover, 2004). Publishers need to take strict action and give credit or co-authorship to the original writers. So yes, it’s time to join the battle against the individual plagiarisers and theinstitutional inaction against plagiarism.Endnotes1/2[i] This line has been subsequently edited out from the entry on Rajiv Malhotra on Wikipedia, but the content isavailable here.[ii] A couple of years ago CNBC published an article on how university professors had the least stressful jobs. Thereal experiences of young academics are in this article that went viral a couple of years ago, and from which I’vetaken the above lines.Image credit: flickr/Maik Meid CC BY-SA 2.0Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the South Asia @ LSE blog, nor of theLondon School of Economics. Please read ourcomments policy before posting.About the AuthorDr Swati Dhingra is a Lecturer in LSE’s Department of Economics.Copyright © 2016 London School of Economics2/2

Time to join the war on the error of plagiarism

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