Weimann: Oops, Better Retract
The new issue of Bruce Hoffman’s Studies in Conflict and Terrorism carries a retraction:
The abstract of the article by Gabriel Weimann and Katharina von Knop titled “Applying the Notion of Noise to Countering Online-Terrorism,” published in vol. 31, no. 10 (October 2008) of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, pp. 883–902, used language that was nearly identical to the description found on the back cover of the book by Johnny Ryan, Countering Militant Islamist Radicalization on the Internet: A User Driven Strategy to Recover the Web (Dublin: Institute of European Affairs, 2007). The authors wish to acknowledge this regrettable occurrence and note the original source of this description.
The article abstract went as follows:
The growing presence of modern terrorism on the Internet is at the nexus of two key trends: the democratization of communications driven by user-generated content on the Internet; and the growing awareness of modern terrorists of the potential of the Internet for their purposes. How best can the terrorists’ use and abuse of the Internet be countered? As this article argues, the answer to violent radicalization on the Internet lies not in censorship of the Internet, but in a more sophisticated and complicated strategy, relying on the theoretical notion of “noise” in communication process theory.
Johnny’s book blurb:
Violent radicalisation on the Internet is at the nexus of two key trends: the democratisation of communications driven by user generated content on the Internet; and the democratisation of strategic violence driven by mass-casualty non-state terrorism. How best can Europe capitalise on the first trend to counter the second? This book examines this question using primary materials drawn from web forum conversations, al Qaeda documents, texts of leading Islamist thinkers, opinion polls, policy documents and interviews with technology and security specialists. The answer to violent radicalisation on the Internet lies not in censorship of the Internet, but in the “user driven” Internet revolution.
The identical passages are in bold. What a mistaka to maka. Glad they’ve corrected it.
And while we’re on the subject of users being the key to web counter-strategies, read Jarret Brachman’s post, Making Jihobbyists our New Secret Weapon in Combating Jihobbyism.
that does seem a little close, though I often wonder when one considers the amount that people read and write whether sometimes it is merely accidental?
Sometimes, of course. I wouldn’t like to say what happened on this occasion though.
It’s true that when writing about the same subject over and again, it gets harder to write truly original language each time. And that can be when the dreaded self-plagiarism creeps in too.
I don’t know how common plagiarism is but at Weimann’s level it’s pretty rare. There’s no suggestion he was even aware of the similarities between his co-authored abstract and Johnny’s jacket-blurb but the retraction shows how seriously he and the journal take even the merest hint of plagiarism. Rightly so.
This does remind me a bit of Chip Berlet’s sniffing out of Marc Sageman’s plagiarism in Leaderless Jihad. Whether true or not, Sageman’s publishers did change subsequent editions of the book.