Plagiarism of my book

[Herbert Pauls]

Hello everyone!
Last February Alan Howe kindly let this forum know about my ebook on 20th C romantic music:
www.unsungcomposers.com/forum/index.php/topic,5472.msg57610.html#msg57610

Unfortunately, there is now a 24pg pdf article afloat on the web dealing with the same topic. If any of you have seen this article, (entitled The XXth Century Romantic Revival Issues. Scriabin's and Glazunov's Cases), you should know that about 80 percent of it consists of substantial passages directly taken (and slightly reworded) from my book. The scholar and pianist Dr. Andreea Bratu (Ovidius University in Constanta) wrote the article and presented it at an international conference in St. Petersburg in October. It was then published by the European Skryabin Society at componisten.netwww.componisten.net/downloads/Scriabin's%20and%20%20Glazunov's%20cases.pdf).

Andreea Bratu has received letters from me as well as my Doktorvater in Germany but in a return email this morning has denied that anything is wrong. So as protection of my writing, and to throw the issue in front of the public court of opinion so to speak, the following link will show 20 pages worth of comparative passages (I did not catalogue the whole article). http://www.herbertpauls.com/dr-andreea-bratu-ovidius-university-plagiarizes-two-centuries-in-one.html

Cheers!
Herb

[Mark Thomas]

On the face of it, this is as blatant a case of plagiarism as I have seen. Have you contacted the European Skryabin Society, who presumably published the article in good faith? Maybe they can bring some influence to bear on Mr Bratu to make amends?

[MartinH]

Wow! Having read the two side-by-side I think there's a clear case of plagiarism. No question. At Arizona State just this week a history professor was terminated for plagiarism less than this.

[Gareth Vaughan]

If Ms Bratu's work had been submitted as an essay or dissertation at a British University the plagiarism would immediately have been detected (there are powerful tools which universities use to detect such plagiarism) and dismissed forthwith. This is a disgrace and Bratu needs to be exposed for the charlatan she undoubtedly is.

[Herbert Pauls]

Mark, I have written to the European Skryabin Society. I have not yet heard back, but imagine that they will eventually pull the article. The Society's occasion for publishing it was because their secretary and president were on the organizing committee of the Scriabin/Glazunov conference in St. Petersburg, where the author gave her scholarly presentation of the research contained in this paper last October. I have also notified the organizing committee of the St. Petersburg conference itself because it is expected that it will be published in the conference proceedings (if it hasn't already, as the author claimed in her personal blog. The blog disappeared from the web in the middle of last night, and also contained information about this essay as well as the conference she attended).

[Mark Thomas]

Looks as if you might be getting somewhere.

[Alan Howe]

Good to hear this. Let's hope that honesty and decency prevail.

[semloh]

It's hard to credit that anyone would have the nerve to do this in such an open and obvious way, and then deny that there is a problem - obviously not the sharpest knife in the drawer!

[Ilja]

Oh, there are much more obvious and much more blatant cases around. The problem is often language barriers; as an example, Russians can easily plagiarize French material, and vice versa, because the pool of people enversed in both languages can be very small, particularly in small research communities. Happily, the problem is getting a lot more attention these days – but it needs to, in the light of predatory publishers and the pressures of academic publishing.


And Gareth, I'm far less optimistic than you are in supposing that such plagiarism would automatically get detected in Britain (or the Netherlands, or Germany for that matter) because of the presence of detection tools. Having such tools is one thing, but using them is quite another. Time constraints, sloppiness or sometimes a laissez-faire attitude often get in the way of rigour. And even if you do use them, far from everything is indexed.

[Ilja]

If you want to ascertain the precise extent of the plagiarism, you may use this tool: http://people.f4.htw-berlin.de/~weberwu/Tools/Text-Compare.html. It is also used by the VroniPlag Wiki team, which has tracked similar examples of plagiarism in the past.

[Herbert Pauls]

The problem with all detection tools is that, at the end of the day, they can only detect when group of words has been replicated exactly. But in fairness, the designers of these tools know this, and add that only human intelligence can be the final judge in many cases.

Out of curiosity, after I found Ms. Bratu's article, I tried one such tool, inserting all manner of random phrases and sentences (the length had to be more than six or seven words) from her work. Every time, the internet search yielded her article but never my book. If I put any short snippet from my book into the tool, the internet search immediately yielded my book. There was always only one search result in each case.

At that point my feelings of pity  for the author (perhaps she was merely naive...etc) gave way to slightly stronger emotions, because it was then apparent that the author had gone to great lengths to ensure that she had made just enough changes to my texts to allow her work to slip under under the radar of many, if not all, internet detection tools. To compound the matter, she had expended very great effort in reading a very long book in a language that was not her own native tongue (her English is very weak on the evidence of the long email she wrote to me), merely in order to craft what she had crafted.

[Mark Thomas]

A pity that she didn't expend all that effort on original work.

[sdtom]

Why do that when Herbert did all of the work. Asking for permission and giving him credit would not be too much to ask.

[Herbert Pauls]

But Tom, the trouble is, there is no way she could even rescue her article. About eighty percent of it is by me. Page after page consist only of cut and pasted, stitched together, and slightly reworded material that she did not write at all, including directly re-used quotations, everything! The footnotes would look mighty funny! All full of herbs, but next to no meat and potatoes.

[rosflute]

You have my sympathy. I know how it feels since I also have seen my work plagiarised. I have come to terms with it, and decided to accept it as a compliment since there is nothing that I can do about it!