[R] 'R' Software Output Plagiarism

Tue Sep 22 18:52:32 CEST 2015

Very good point about the referencing. 

I wonder if this is happening to users of Stata or SAS as well?

John Kane
Kingston ON Canada

> -----Original Message-----
> From: marc_schwartz at me.com
> Sent: Tue, 22 Sep 2015 11:24:13 -0500
> To: bgunter.4567 at gmail.com
> Subject: Re: [R] 'R' Software Output Plagiarism
> 
> Hi,
> 
> With the usual caveat that I Am Not A Lawyer....and that I am not
> speaking on behalf of any organization...
> 
> My guess is that they are claiming that the output of R, simply being
> copied and pasted verbatim into your thesis constitutes the use of
> copyrighted output from the software.
> 
> It is not clear to me that R's output is copyrighted by the R Foundation
> (or by other parties for CRAN packages), albeit, the source code
> underlying R is, along with other copyright owner's as apropos. There is
> some caselaw to support the notion that the output alone is not protected
> in a similar manner, but that may be country specific.
> 
> Did you provide any credit to R (see the output of citation() ) in your
> thesis and indicate that your analyses were performed using R?
> 
> If R is uncredited, I could see them raising the issue.
> 
> You might check with your institution's legal/policy folks to see if
> there is any guidance provided for students regarding the crediting of
> software used in this manner, especially if that guidance is at no cost
> to you.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Marc Schwartz
> 
> 
>> On Sep 22, 2015, at 11:01 AM, Bert Gunter <bgunter.4567 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> 
>> 1. It is highly unlikely that we could be of help (unless someone else
>> has experienced this and knows what happened). You will have to
>> contact the Urkund people and ask them why their algorithms raised the
>> flags.
>> 
>> 2. But of course, the regression methodology is not "your own" -- it's
>> just a standard tool that you used in your work, which is entirely
>> legitimate of course.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Bert
>> 
>> 
>> Bert Gunter
>> 
>> "Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. And knowledge
>> is certainly not wisdom."
>>   -- Clifford Stoll
>> 
>> 
>> On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 7:27 AM, BARRETT, Oliver
>> <oliver.barrett at skema.edu> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Dear 'R' community support,
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I am a student at Skema business school and I have recently submitted
>>> my MSc thesis/dissertation. This has been passed on to an external
>>> plagiarism service provider, Urkund, who have scanned my document and
>>> returned a plagiarism report to my professor having detected 32%
>>> plagiarism.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I have contacted Urkund regarding this issue having committed no such
>>> plagiarism and they have told me that all the plagiarism detected in my
>>> document comes from the last 25% which consists only of 'R' regressions
>>> like the one I have pasted below:
>>> 
>>> lm(formula = Prague50 ~ Fed + Fed.t.1. + Fed.t.2. + Fed.t.3. +
>>>    Fed.t.4., data = OLS_CAR, x = TRUE)
>>> 
>>> Residuals:
>>>      Min        1Q    Median        3Q       Max
>>> -0.154587 -0.015961  0.001429  0.017196  0.110907
>>> 
>>> Coefficients:
>>>             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
>>> (Intercept) -0.001630   0.001763  -0.925   0.3559
>>> Fed         -0.121595   0.165359  -0.735   0.4627
>>> Fed.t.1.     0.344014   0.140979   2.440   0.0153 *
>>> Fed.t.2.     0.026529   0.143648   0.185   0.8536
>>> Fed.t.3.     0.622357   0.142021   4.382 1.62e-05 ***
>>> Fed.t.4.     0.291985   0.158914   1.837   0.0671 .
>>> ---
>>> Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
>>> 
>>> Residual standard error: 0.0293 on 304 degrees of freedom
>>>  (20 observations deleted due to missingness)
>>> Multiple R-squared:  0.08629,  Adjusted R-squared:  0.07126
>>> F-statistic: 5.742 on 5 and 304 DF,  p-value: 4.422e-05
>>> 
>>> I have produced all of these regressions myself and pasted them
>>> directly from the 'R' software package. My regression methodology is
>>> entirely my own along with the sourcing and preperation of the data
>>> used to produce these statistics.
>>> 
>>> I would be very grateful if you could provide my with some clarity as
>>> to why this output from 'R' is reading as plagiarism.
>>> 
>>> I would like to thank you in advance,
>>> 
>>> Kind regards,
>>> 
>>> Oliver Barrett
>>> (+44) 7341 834 217
>>> 
>>>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>> 
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>> 
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

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