“It can involve an unreasonable amount of time, an unreasonable amount of work, and an unreasonably uphill struggle to obtain retractions of philosophy publications, no matter how blatant the plagiarism discovered and how indisputable the documentation.”
Research outputs can be retracted for innocuous and administrative reasons, but often there can be far more serious reasons why an output is retracted. Plagiarism is perhaps amongst the most serious reasons why an output needs to be retracted. It is beholden on publishers to act quickly on evidence of serious problems with a paper. They have a responsibility to protect the integrity of the scientific record, especially when it comes to serious problems with the paper. This piece discusses problems with retracting a philosophy paper with considerable plagiarism.
It’s all too hard to get plagiarizing philosophy publications retracted.
Here’s a case in point:
In December 2022, the editors of Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought, and Religion published a retraction statement—both online and in the printed version of the journal’s 2022 issue (vol. 77, p. 465)—for this article:
M. W. F. Stone, “Adrian of Utrecht and the University of Louvain: Theology and the Discussion of Moral Problems in the Late Fifteenth Century”, Traditio 61 (2006), pp. 247-287.
Although the extensive plagiarism by Stone in the Traditio article had been publicly flagged since 2010, it took 11 years, a new publisher, a new editor-in-chief, and a complete mark-up with highlighting of all the plagiarizing passages to obtain the retraction of this 41-page article.
