By coincidence, during a time in which plagiarism has suddenly become a big topic in local politics, I received an email a few days ago about an apparent plagiarism case I discovered last year.
Pscychology Prof. Roxanne Cohen Silver of the University of California Irvine notified me that a British Psychological Society journal published a correction based on this blog item I wrote in November.
In doing research on a story about "Large Group Awareness Trainings" -- the kind of programs James Arthur Ray was doing -- I found that an Israeli psychologist, Gidi Rubinstein, had apparently copied the words of Silver and other researchers. The two journal articles, published 15 years apart, started with the same 85 words and had other matching passages. Here are pdfs of the 1990 article, and the 2005 one.
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Recently, the journal Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, published a correction. It is not available online (unless you want to spend $30 for it), but it says "Unfortunately, this article included an introduction from an article published 15 years earlier ... A large portion of the Klar et al. introduction was republished in the Rubinstein introduction without permission, attribution or quotation marks."
