Plagiarism: Someone is publishing my blogs under their byline

Someone named Chris Lynn at the blog Worldwide News has taken dozens of my blog posts and put his own byline on top of them.

Evidently the sole purpose of the blog Worldwide News has been to kill the online version of an investigative report about official corruption published by the Mail & Guardian newspaper in South Africa.

Both of these blog posts were published by me. Chris Lynn's byline is on them now. Click to enlarge image

It's a clever scheme in which this Chris Lynn (whoever that is) copy-pasted the Mail & Guardian article onto his own blog, then claimed to have been plagiarized by the original publisher and got the Mail & Guardian's internet hosting site to remove the supposedly plagiarized original article.

Update: The people behind the plagiarism

The original investigation, which describes the activities of a man in Africa posing as a U.S. Congressman, appears among dozens of other articles on the Worldwide News blog, most of which are my blog posts. Evidently the thinking was -- and this is a humbling thought -- that search engines would see a blog with mostly academic content by an obscure American professor and not call attention to an article about scandal hidden in the academic weeds.

Plagiarism has profilerated; you can avoid it

Giving credit to others enhances credibility, trust

We are not born knowing common courtesy. Someone has to teach us, and then we have to practice it.

We also are not born knowing what plagiarism is, and those of us who haven't learned to avoid it could be in big trouble.

Plagiarizing the work of others will get you expelled from a university, fired from a news organization, or dismissed from public office

The issue of plagiarism is especially relevant at the moment in Spain, where high-ranking officials in two major political parties have had to respond to evidence of plagiarism — here and here — revealed in investigative reports by the web publication eldiario.es and the TV station La Sexta.

(See some other examples at the end of this post).

Today it is so easy to copy and paste material digitally that some are getting sloppy and careless in newsrooms and academia.

Here are some guidelines:

• On the most basic level, it's common courtesy. Don't take credit for someone else's work.
• Put direct quotes in quotation marks and name the source. 
• If you have paraphrased a direct quote, be sure to name the source at the end of the paraphrase. 
• If you make extensive use of a source, mention the name of the author in every paragraph.