Lila Harper’s presentation on “What We Can Learn about Plagiarism from Master’s Theses” began with the assertion that people working on Master’s theses may not necessarily be familiar with the academic conventions surrounding documentation and plagiarism. She spoke with a particular expertise because of her responsibilities as thesis editor for a comprehensive university: she source-checks and copyedits every Master’s thesis submitted — typically about 50 per year — prior to its placement in the university library. Her initial assumption was that plagiarism would not be a concern, but when she encountered an unidentified acronym in the manuscript, she Googled it, and discovered several pages of unattributed material from another source in the student’s manuscript. Upon further research, Harper discovered that inappropriate use of sources is common among all graduate disciplines. Even skilled writers, she argues, have problems with the appropriate necessary “transparency” of citation (which can sometimes manifest itself as Rebecca Moore Howard’s “patchwriting”). Other problems include poorly worded paraphrases and indirect citation, and many of the confusions writers exhibit seem to be linked to the types of style manual they use. Not so much concerned with the “theft of knowledge,” Harper is instead interested in citation as a method of evaluating the foundations of a discipline’s mode of knowledge production.

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