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Professor plagiarizes prostate cancer imaging review paper and blames ghost writer.
(retractionwatch.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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No, ghostwriting is not plagiarism. Done correctly, there is nothing wrong with it. Hard to argue this professor did it correctly
How do you define the two terms? I'm genuinely curious since the definitions I've seen for the terms imply that it is a type of plagiarism, but they definitely don't have the same connotations.
A ghostwriter is usually someone hired to produce a piece of written work, with set terms like deadlines, payment, possibly confidentiality, and other things. Things like memoirs (even some presidents') are ghostwritten by someone who listens to rambling stories and takes notes to produce something readable.
Plagiarism suggests Person B presenting Person A's work as their own without Person A or their intended audience knowing that fact. In this scenario there is no compensation for the claimed work and presumably no communication or cooperation between the writer and plagiarizer.
Thanks for the comment, that was very insightful. I'm not sure I fully agree with this definition of plagiarism in academia though, but rather I am familiar with a broader one that includes both willful prearranged plagiarism and even self plagiarism.
In academia, the main discriminating factor to establish plagiarism would be the presence or absence of references, so in this case it would mean that the review would have had to include the ghostwriter as an author directly (and hence wouldn't be a ghostwriter anymore 😉