I would say its sloppiness that has risen to the level of plagiarism, said Valerie Seiling Jacobs, a Columbia University writing professor and attorney who leads a project to help students avoid plagiarism. Its not like (Willingham has) cut and pasted her thesis and claimed it as her own, but she has failed to properly cite and attribute the words and ideas of other writers.
Harold Skip Garner, a Virginia Tech biochemistry professor who created a website that catches plagiarism in scientific research articles, said some of the suspect passages are long enough to suggest they were knowingly copied. Sometimes, he said, writers will inadvertently copy from memory shorter phrases that they came across in their research.
Its clear that in order to get something like a whole sentence or paragraph in, you did the (cut and paste) somewhere, and that should be an immediate signal that you should put it in quotes, he said.
