Last week I caught a plagiarist.
In a research paper published recently in a minor journal, I realized that the authors had directly copied several sentences from the Introduction to an earlier paper that I'd been reading recently. Even the references from the original were cloned. Given the context, it's extremely unlikely that they had permission.
This is an open and shut case of plagiarism. There's no dispute that plagiarism is bad. So I was about to write to the editor of the journal and the original authors when I looked up who the culprits were Polish.
This has happened before. A while back I detected plagiarism on a similar scale, again a very clear cut case, from some Brazilian authors.
I haven't reported either case. That's what this post is about.
Why not? It's nothing to do with the idea that in "other cultures", copying is regarded differently, so ...
