On May 24, I published a post titled “Can Urban Agriculture Help with Food Security?,” in which I discussed the conclusions of a new working paper I had discovered through RepEc’s mailing list for new working papers in agricultural economics.
Last week Alberto Zezza, with whom I had corresponded about other things in the past, wrote to me to let me know that the paper I had linked to on May 24 appeared to have plagiarized one of his own published articles. Here is the abstract of Alberto and his coauthor’s article, which was published in Food Policy in 2010:
Urban agriculture may have a role to play in addressing urban food insecurity problems, which are bound to become increasingly important with the secular trend towards the urbanization of poverty and of population in developing regions. Our understanding of the importance, nature and food security implications of urban agriculture is however plagued by a lack of good quality, reliable data. While studies based on survey data do exist for several major cities, much of the evidence is still qualitative if not anecdotal. Using a recently created dataset bringing together comparable, nationally representative household survey data for 15 developing or transition countries, this paper analyzes in a comparative international perspective the importance of urban agriculture for the urban poor and food insecure. Some clear hints do come from our analysis. On the one hand, the potential for urban agriculture to play a substantial role in urban poverty and food insecurity reduction should not be overemphasized, as its share in income and overall agricultural production is often quite limited. On the other hand, though, its role should also not be too easily dismissed, particularly in much of Africa and in all those countries in which agriculture provides a substantial share of income for the urban poor, and for those groups of households to which it constitutes an important source of livelihoods. We also find fairly consistent evidence of a positive statistical association between engagement in urban agriculture and dietary adequacy indicators.
I have updated the original post so that people know what happened and to credit Alberto’s work, but I want to offer Alberto and his coauthor my apologies for not catching this, and for not having been aware of their 2010 article. Moreover, I want to offer my readers my apologies for that inadvertently misleading post.
That said, it would be a mistake to accuse the person whose name appears on the working paper I had originally linked to. As Alberto put it in an email:
While [name] is indicated as the author, it will require a careful investigation with the host website to figure out if someone else has used his name, or whether he is actually the person who has plagiarized our work.
As such, one of Alberto’s collaborators has notified RepEc’s plagiarism committee — the closest thing we academic economists have to a tribunal on such matters.
Plagiarism is a serious problem which needs to be dealt with fairly and efficiently, and I am glad that the economics profession has come up with its own institutions to deal with the problem. I myself had to deal with plagiarism during my first year on the tenure track, when I was asked to referee a paper that had copied entire portions of my dissertation’s first essay.
In my case, it was fairly obvious that my work had been plagiarized, and I had the side-by-side comparisons and working paper time stamps to prove it. But it certainly took me some time to write the document needed to convince the editor that I had been wronged, and time is one’s most precious resource. Ultimately, the editor told me that the manuscript had been rejected, that the “author” had received a talking to in the decision letter, and that the people in charge at the plagiarist’s university had been contacted.
I never found out who it was that had plagiarized my work, but I have a strong suspicion as to who it might be. Indeed, the plagiarized manuscript contained only references to published papers, save for a single unpublished working paper: an unpublished working paper so obscure that one could not even find it through a Google search. But then again, if someone is dumb enough to plagiarize other people’s work, it is perhaps no surprise that one would be dumb enough to out oneself that way…
On Plagiarism
On May 24, I published a post titled “Can Urban Agriculture Help with Food Security?,” in which I discussed the conclusions of a new working paper I had discovered through RepEc’s mailing list for new working papers in agricultural economics.
Last week Alberto Zezza, with whom I had corresponded about other things in the past, wrote to me to let me know that the paper I had linked to on May 24 appeared to have plagiarized one of his own published articles. Here is the abstract of Alberto and his coauthor’s article, which was published in Food Policy in 2010:
I have updated the original post so that people know what happened and to credit Alberto’s work, but I want to offer Alberto and his coauthor my apologies for not catching this, and for not having been aware of their 2010 article. Moreover, I want to offer my readers my apologies for that inadvertently misleading post.
That said, it would be a mistake to accuse the person whose name appears on the working paper I had originally linked to. As Alberto put it in an email:
As such, one of Alberto’s collaborators has notified RepEc’s plagiarism committee — the closest thing we academic economists have to a tribunal on such matters.
Plagiarism is a serious problem which needs to be dealt with fairly and efficiently, and I am glad that the economics profession has come up with its own institutions to deal with the problem. I myself had to deal with plagiarism during my first year on the tenure track, when I was asked to referee a paper that had copied entire portions of my dissertation’s first essay.
In my case, it was fairly obvious that my work had been plagiarized, and I had the side-by-side comparisons and working paper time stamps to prove it. But it certainly took me some time to write the document needed to convince the editor that I had been wronged, and time is one’s most precious resource. Ultimately, the editor told me that the manuscript had been rejected, that the “author” had received a talking to in the decision letter, and that the people in charge at the plagiarist’s university had been contacted.
I never found out who it was that had plagiarized my work, but I have a strong suspicion as to who it might be. Indeed, the plagiarized manuscript contained only references to published papers, save for a single unpublished working paper: an unpublished working paper so obscure that one could not even find it through a Google search. But then again, if someone is dumb enough to plagiarize other people’s work, it is perhaps no surprise that one would be dumb enough to out oneself that way…
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Published in Commentary, Economics and Miscellaneous