Journal editors responding to plagiarism cases: Historical sociolinguistic evidence from Chinese journals

Abstract

<p>Historical research on the issue of plagiarism sheds light on the sociocultural ecologies of the historical settings and the lineage of the contemporary controversies over the concepts of originality and authorship (Eisner & Vicinus, 2008; Haviland & Mullin, 2009). Given the prominence of the Chinese, or more broadly, the Confucian Heritage Culture, context in the literature on plagiarism, insights that can be gained from a historical sociolinguistic perspective on the Chinese context would be promising in pushing the boundary of the current literature. We have argued previously that, contrary to popular misunderstandings, plagiarism has been strongly condemned in China, from the ancient times up until the present day (Authors, 2019). Nevertheless, systematic evidence and the trajectory of the plagiarism discourse that parallels the sociopolitical transformation of China are yet to be established. Drawing upon the discourse theory (Fairclough, 1992, 2003) and the perspective of diachronic genre analysis (Bazerman, 1988; Gillaerts, 2013), we aim to address this gap in the literature in our study.</p><p><br></p><p>Our study is based on a Correspondence on Plagiarism Cases Corpus (CPCC) which consists of around 400 letters of different genres (readers’ reports of plagiarism, journal editors’ statements, and the plagiarisers’ apologies or defense) retrieved from the journals section in the mega-database China National Knowledge Infrastructure (<a href="http://www.cnki.net/">www.cnki.net</a>). A modest set of the letters were published in the 1950s-60s (following the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution 1966-76 when there was a break in Chinese publishing), and the rest in the 1980s-2010s. Our study focuses on the editorial statements in the CPCC, or 22 such texts in the 1950s-60s and 166 in the 1980s-2010s, and aims to address two research questions: 1) How do the editorial statements on plagiarism cases in the two periods of 1950s-60s and 1980s-2010s compare in terms of their rhetorical move structures, and their choice of lexis? 2) How do the linguistic features connect to the discourses of the social changes?</p><p><br></p><p>Rhetorical move analysis (Swales, 1990) revealed that most of the rhetorical moves in the editorial statements of the 1950s-60s can also be found in the 1980s-2010s, but there are move disappearance or encapsulation as well as appearance of new moves in the later period of time, with less emphasis placed on educating the plagiarisers but more on their punishment over time, and with digital publishing influencing the procedure of handling plagiarism. Through discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1992, 2003) facilitated by corpus methods (O'Keeffe & McCarthy, 2010), it was found that, firstly, the editorial statements of the 1950s-60s appropriated the discourse of criticism and self-criticism of the time, while associating plagiarism with “the exploitative bourgeois practice” that was in opposition to the spirit of the time boosted by the Great Leap Forward movement and socialist/communist ideals; secondly, the texts in the 1980s-1990s demonstrated “over-lexicalisation” (Fowler, 1991) in characterising plagiarisers and their plagiarising behavior, and they also drew upon the discourse of the socio-economic construction in the early days of the Reform and Opening-up; and finally, in the 2000s-2010s, the editorial statements increasingly took on a legal discourse and gave way to retraction notices.</p><p><br></p><p>Our study demonstrates the value of applying detailed genre-based analysis in combination with discourse analysis facilitated by corpus methods to a longitudinal collection of texts in exploring an important issue in academic writing in a non-Anglophone context. </p><p><br></p><p><strong>References</strong></p><p><br></p><p>Authors (2019)</p><p>Eisner, C., & Vicinus, M. (2008). <em>Originality, imitation, and plagiarism: Teaching writing in the digital age</em>. The University of Michigan Press.</p><p>Bazerman, C. (1988). <em>Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental article in science</em>. University of Wisconsin Press.</p><p>Fairclough, N. (1992). <em>Discourse and social change</em>: Polity Press.</p><p>Fairclough, N. (2003). <em>Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. </em>Routledge.</p><p>Fowler, R. (1991). <em>Language in the news: Discourse and ideology in the press</em>. Routledge.</p><p>Gillaerts, P. (2013). Move analysis of abstracts from a diachronic perspective: A case study. In N.-L. Johannesson, G. Melchers, & B. Björkman (Eds.),<em> Of butterflies and birds, of dialects and genres: Essays in honour of Philip Shaw</em> (pp. 49-60). Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis.</p><p>Haviland, C. P., & Mullin, J. A. (Eds.) (2009). <em>Who owns this text?: Plagiarism, authorship, and disciplinary cultures</em>. Logan, Utah Utah State University Press.</p><p>O'Keeffe, A., & McCarthy, M. (Eds.) (2010). <em>The Routledge handbook of corpus linguistics. </em>Routledge. </p><p>Swales, J. (1990). <em>Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings</em>. Cambridge University Press.</p>