How Shameless Can People Get — My Work Gets Plagiarized for the First Time
Ever since I learned that Microsoft had opened up the WRK source code in early 2008, I have been organizing students to read and modify it. Only I know the bittersweet feelings involved.
Based on the previous phase of work, I applied for the 2008 “Ministry of Education — Microsoft Elite Course” and was successfully approved. The elite course website is as follows:
http://sse.tongji.edu.cn/oswrk/
Recently there was a national conference on OS teaching. I wanted to publish a paper on the Windows Research Kernel, introducing an OS experiment platform I had been envisioning. When writing a paper, the old formula requires referencing some articles, so I searched Wanfang and Weipu. That search turned up a paper published in the 2008 20th issue of “Computer Education” titled “Exploration of Windows OS Principles Experiment Teaching Based on WRK”, authored byPeng Min (associate professor) and He Yanxiang (professor and dean of the Computer School) from Wuhan University. Seeing that someone had already done similar work, I had to read it carefully. But the more I read, the more uncomfortable I felt. Why? Parts of it seemed familiar. Wasn’t this from the elite course proposal I wrote last year? I opened my own elite course website, and the more I looked, the more it matched. Toward the end, some paragraphs were directly copy/pasted! And the paper’s references didn’t mention the elite course website at all! Too brazen.
I won’t analyze in detail — see for yourself:
For a closer look, click the link below:
Source: http://sse.tongji.edu.cn/oswrk/glfa.htm
Target: http://omale.blogbus.com/files/12407615510.pdf
(Articles are well “protected” in China — the full text isn’t available online, so I uploaded it to my own blog space.)
By the way, a Google search shows that paper even won an award at the 2008 Intel Cup National Computer Education Outstanding Paper Competition
Sigh! Even Intel was fooled, directly affecting Intel’s lofty image in my mind. Professor Peng, Dean He, you two sure know how to stir things up.
What to do? What else can I do? Plagiarize away — at least it’s proof of my capability. And it’s not like this thing will win a Nobel Prize. It’s small stuff. Take it and use it. Since the second author shares my surname, even though I don’t know you, I’ll let you off this time. But condemnation is still necessary, and exposure is still necessary. I still need to write my new paper, just avoiding this topic to prevent anyone from saying I copied from her…
Come to think of it, last year Wuhan University Computer School had the SCIGEN-generated paper incident (Google keyword: scigen 武大). Compared to that, my plagiarism case is entirely understandable. Wuhan University, I won’t say anything more about you.
Appendix: What is Plagiarism
Definition of plagiarism is very strict
Pay special attention to all of the above</span>
1) Idea plagiarism
Not citing others' sources, claiming ideas as own — serious plagiarism
2) Sentence plagiarism
Not reorganizing others' ideas, copying original text without quotation marks, even with references added — still plagiarism
3) Excessive quoting of others' original text
Even with quotation marks, counts as plagiarism, e.g., three or more sentences
4) Sentences reorganized but entire paragraph very similar to others'
Especially when key verbs are nearly identical and sentence structure is the same — counts as plagiarism
5) Don't copy others' figures directly</p>
Even after the following processing, it still counts as plagiarism
1) Deleting a few sentences
2) Reversing sentence order
3) Adding a few sentences
4) Changing only some verbs and a few words while keeping the overall structure the same