What’s an Academic Fraud?
I recently discovered I am an academic fraud. Now, I am sure there must be people out there whose immediate response is “of course you are”, “knew it” or “I am not surprised”, but I was. Admittedly, what amounts to fraud when publishing as an academic isn’t always entirely clear to me – which, to some, is enough to be suspect (if not guilty-till-proven-innocent) already. I do get the extremes; I’m not that daft: If one writes up a truly new academic study giving the full account of the research underlying it, it ain’t fraud. If you make up the data – emulating the now infamous Diederik Stapel – it is. But sometimes in between, I am not always sure… Let me give you a few potential examples. • Last month, at the Editorial Board Meeting of the Academy of Management Journal , the editor reported that the journal would now start screening every submitted article for plagiarism. The software turns up whether parts of the text have been copied from earlier publications, including articles by...