Many student researchers wouldnt discuss their research work for this article, even with guarantees of anonymity, because they fear jeopardizing a professors future support. This secrecy, combined with the fact that the line between research and writing is often fuzzy, keeps the system obtuse and subject to abuse. Except where it produces outright plagiarism, its essentially unregulated by Harvard policyand even implicitly sanctioned, as Boks quote about Ogletrees case suggested. Yet if the undergraduates doing this research attempted the same outsourcing of written work in their term papers, theyd face disciplinary proceedings, and several student researchers told me they felt uneasy about this cognitive dissonance between expectations for their own work and that of their professors.
<p>The link does not work. I'll hazard a guess, without knowing anything of the particulars of this case.</p>
<p>It's expected that many profs will have research assistants. It is expected that students will do their own research as well as writing. It is interesting to me that the accusations of plagiarism have been lodged against various law profs. I do believe that in the legal profession, the head of a legal team employs others to do the research. Big law firms have substantial libraries for that purpose.</p>
<p>Whether or not a prof is committing plagiarism really depends on what is expected of the student researchers. Profs (and not just law profs) typically employ research assistants, often on work-study. The research assistants are not the ones setting the research agenda or providing a theoretical framework for analyzing the information they gather. If Prof. Ogletree said to one of them "Please read up on what happened in Jena and summarize what is known about it for me," I do not think that this would constitute plagiarism. He would definitely have to acknowledge the student's contribution in the preface of the book or the footnotes of the article. If he had assigned research papers to his class, and one of the students had decided to write on Jena and if Ogletree then appropriated the information from the term paper without notifying or acknowledging the author, then that would be plagiarism.</p>
<p>The students on work-study I know would much rather do library research than sit in the lobby of their dorm checking students' ID, or working behind the circulation desk of the library. They think they are learning something by doing library research. S has a friend who was delighted to be doing research for a law prof last summer; he really hopes the research will make it into the prof's book!</p>
<p>I'm sorry the link doesn't work - it does for me. This is a four page article in the Nov/Dec magazine, 02138. The focus is not Prof Oglethorpe per se; several other profs are also mentioned (not just at Harvard). I originally had quoted several other paragraphs from the article that I thought gave a better indication of its content, but those were edited out from my post. </p>
<p>The gray areas between authorship and research are discussed, as is an "atelier" approach to academic publishing. Also an assertion is made that scholarship suffers when professors enter the realm of celebrity through their popular writings, TV appearances, etc. I find it thought-provoking.</p>
<p>It does sound thought-provoking. I tried again, and the link still does not work. Too bad.
S's friend was one of several researchers, so I guess he would be part of an atelier.</p>
<p>It is an interesting piece, not least for what it has to say about Dershowitz's version of "research" and the career of H.L. Gates.</p>
<p>I'm not sure what to make of the article. It is a different scene in the natural sciences, where peer-reviewed papers may contain the names of five or six people, including post-docs, graduate students, research professors, occasional undergrads and, of course, the principal investigator. Just about everybody who had anything to do with the work is acknowledged in the author line.</p>
<p>I think the use of unnamed researchers is not uncommon for fields like economics, where part of a student's training consists of learning how to do research, assemble tables, run regressions, etc. However, none of the economists I know use the actual writing of their assistants. Furthermore, the technical work is generally checked rather closely in some manner before it is used in a paper or book being submitted for publication. In some of the examples given in this article, it sounds like the author has so many things going on that there is no time to even carefully review submitted work. Sounds like living dangerously.</p>
<p>Perhaps social science and humanities profs should take a lesson from the natural scientists. Many of those science papers have first (and second and third) drafts written by students, but are generally closely overseen by the profs.</p>
<p>I think I'll have to go out an buy a copy of the magazine as the link still does not work for me. Wonder why...</p>
<p>Social scientists and humanities profs are much less likely than profs in the sciences to have teams of researchers. First, they don't have the money, either in terms of salary or research funds to have such teams. second, unless it's statistics-heavy, much of the research has to be done by profs themselves (unlike a law prof asking a student to research specific cases). I can't see anthropologists getting their students to do their fieldwork for them; nor can I picture profs telling students to analyze a poem of novel in their stead. Might as well read the Sparksnote (did I read somewhere that Sparksnotes was launched by Harvard undergraduates)?</p>
<p>Scholarly books in the humanities and social sciences come with acknowledgment pages; and sometimes this includes the names of specific students. More likely, it includes the names of helpful librarians and archivists, colleagues who agreed to read drafts and audiences that sat through various iterations of the materials. </p>
<p>I have heard of profs in the social sciences stealing ideas from their students. Not many cases, though. A grad student friend of mine said he realized the research he'd presented in a term paper ended up, without acknowledgment, in a very influential article on foreign policy, but the conclusion had been turned on its head. Maybe one day he'll reveal the miscreant's name.</p>