[R] 'R' Software Output Plagiarism

[Marc Schwartz]

Hi,

With the usual caveat that I Am Not A Lawyer....and that I am not speaking on behalf of any organization...

My guess is that they are claiming that the output of R, simply being copied and pasted verbatim into your thesis constitutes the use of copyrighted output from the software.

It is not clear to me that R's output is copyrighted by the R Foundation (or by other parties for CRAN packages), albeit, the source code underlying R is, along with other copyright owner's as apropos. There is some caselaw to support the notion that the output alone is not protected in a similar manner, but that may be country specific.

Did you provide any credit to R (see the output of citation() ) in your thesis and indicate that your analyses were performed using R?

If R is uncredited, I could see them raising the issue.

You might check with your institution's legal/policy folks to see if there is any guidance provided for students regarding the crediting of software used in this manner, especially if that guidance is at no cost to you.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz


> On Sep 22, 2015, at 11:01 AM, Bert Gunter <bgunter.4567 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 1. It is highly unlikely that we could be of help (unless someone else
> has experienced this and knows what happened). You will have to
> contact the Urkund people and ask them why their algorithms raised the
> flags.
> 
> 2. But of course, the regression methodology is not "your own" -- it's
> just a standard tool that you used in your work, which is entirely
> legitimate of course.
> 
> Cheers,
> Bert
> 
> 
> Bert Gunter
> 
> "Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. And knowledge
> is certainly not wisdom."
>   -- Clifford Stoll
> 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 7:27 AM, BARRETT, Oliver
> <oliver.barrett at skema.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> Dear 'R' community support,
>> 
>> 
>> I am a student at Skema business school and I have recently submitted my MSc thesis/dissertation. This has been passed on to an external plagiarism service provider, Urkund, who have scanned my document and returned a plagiarism report to my professor having detected 32% plagiarism.
>> 
>> 
>> I have contacted Urkund regarding this issue having committed no such plagiarism and they have told me that all the plagiarism detected in my document comes from the last 25% which consists only of 'R' regressions like the one I have pasted below:
>> 
>> lm(formula = Prague50 ~ Fed + Fed.t.1. + Fed.t.2. + Fed.t.3. +
>>    Fed.t.4., data = OLS_CAR, x = TRUE)
>> 
>> Residuals:
>>      Min        1Q    Median        3Q       Max
>> -0.154587 -0.015961  0.001429  0.017196  0.110907
>> 
>> Coefficients:
>>             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
>> (Intercept) -0.001630   0.001763  -0.925   0.3559
>> Fed         -0.121595   0.165359  -0.735   0.4627
>> Fed.t.1.     0.344014   0.140979   2.440   0.0153 *
>> Fed.t.2.     0.026529   0.143648   0.185   0.8536
>> Fed.t.3.     0.622357   0.142021   4.382 1.62e-05 ***
>> Fed.t.4.     0.291985   0.158914   1.837   0.0671 .
>> ---
>> Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
>> 
>> Residual standard error: 0.0293 on 304 degrees of freedom
>>  (20 observations deleted due to missingness)
>> Multiple R-squared:  0.08629,  Adjusted R-squared:  0.07126
>> F-statistic: 5.742 on 5 and 304 DF,  p-value: 4.422e-05
>> 
>> I have produced all of these regressions myself and pasted them directly from the 'R' software package. My regression methodology is entirely my own along with the sourcing and preperation of the data used to produce these statistics.
>> 
>> I would be very grateful if you could provide my with some clarity as to why this output from 'R' is reading as plagiarism.
>> 
>> I would like to thank you in advance,
>> 
>> Kind regards,
>> 
>> Oliver Barrett
>> (+44) 7341 834 217
>> 
>>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>> 
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.