As regards recourses for plagiarism, it seems to me the laws of 
copyright ought to offer legal redress. They certainly do in the 
music and advertising businesses, where any suspicion of copying 
words, bits of tunes, or even in one recent case, facial appearance, 
are disputed at the drop of a writ. I see nothing ethically wrong in 
using the courts to settle what is in essence a civil dispute, if the 
relevant authorities are not willing to do so. The courts could also 
robustly deal, I would have thought, with problems of 'where to draw 
the line' raised by Julian.

At the risk of extending this interesting discussion on plagiarism in 
a direction it may not want to go, can I raise the related issue of 
misrepresentation?

Ethically, this discussion suggests, our duty as practicing 
economists is to provide the reader with accurate - and verifiable - 
information about the sources of the any evidence we offer.

But if a source, whilst correctly referenced, is misquoted or 
tendentiously reported, this can be just as irresponsible and 
damaging as quoting accurately, but failing to acknowledge. 
Particularly so, when authors merely assert that 'Keynes, as is 
well-known, said x', whereas, in fact, Keynes said nothing of the 
sort - to take a case in point.

My experience is that economists are ready and willing to take up the 
cudgels if the person misrepresented is alive, above all if the 
injured party is the economist in question. But not so willing if the 
injured party is another economist, above all, a dead one. Which 
suggest, as Adam Smith may or may not have noted with approval, that 
self-interest is a more powerful force than altruistic ethical 
values. Misrepresentation, if ethically wrong, is surely wrong in 
general, rather than in particular cases only.

One difference is the following:  there is general recognition that 
plagiarism is unacceptable, which is why when it is discovered, 
editors and reviewers at least usually have the decency to be 
embarrassed. But there seems to be no general recognition of any duty 
to represent accurately, or at least, to make the attempt to do so.

I would be interested to know whether others on this list have encountered:

(1) cases where misrepresentation has been contested
(2) prescriptive material - like the material on plagiarism - which 
contains guidelines as to what is to be deprecated, and what could be 
considered good practice

This is certainly a problem we've tried to address at Critique of 
Political Economy, where we have provided editorial guidelines for 
article reviewers, that specifically refer to this issue.

Alan Freeman