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A thread on light plagiarism: I've published (as in acquired, edited, brought to market) a fair number of books, and I've co-authored a couple as well. The idea of plagiarism terrifies me. 1/x
As a publisher, I have to trust my authors to do the right thing when it comes to citation and credit. That's not only contractual, it's practical as well. 2/x
Contractually, authors warrant that the work is their own. Practically, fact checking and verifying a work of non-fiction is nontrivial. Very nontrivial. 3/x
I've had one book fact checked, and it took *forever,* in addition to requiring many long phone calls with the author, a lawyer, the fact checker, and me. The time we spent on that book... 4/x
But it's not just the time: the fact checking (which required the author to adjust some of their language around claims they were making, but which found no egregious factual issues) would not have turned up issues of plagiarism, to the best of my recollection. 5/x
As an author, I was *terrified* (I cannot stress this enough) about inadvertently copying something without due credit: a placeholder quote from a source, a copy-and-paste job gone wrong. Whatever. 6/x
Plus, I was working with a (very upstanding) co-author, but that meant that some boneheaded mistake of mine could (1) get made undetectable when we were sharing drafts and (2) tar him with an unfair label. 7/x
(Reader, I did not consider he would cause problems for me. @RFisman is meticulous.) 8/x
But before we submitted even the penultimate draft of either book, I ran multiple plagiarism checkers against the text (which, I am happy to report, came back clean). 9/x
I can't imagine not doing that, in addition to all of the other verification one does as one works, as a bare minimum. /fin
