I've Been Plagiarized!

I just got home from back-to-back research trips to New York and San Antonio. On the flight from San Antonio I began reading a book I'd promised a journal editor I'd review for the journal's next issue. The book concerns research on mass media, body image, and eating disorders, the central topic of my research. About 70 pages into the book, I hit a paragraph that struck me as eerily familiar. Once home, I was able to confirm that the authors of the book I was reviewing, which was published in 2005, had copied, word for word, a paragraph I'd written in a journal article published in 1997. Twelve lines, no changes -- er, except I used the % sign and they wrote out "per cent."

I'm seething. Researchers publishing in journals don't get paid for their work, but book authors do. These people literally stole from me. And I strongly suspect that they've plagiarized other authors. Neither of the book's authors make their living researching this topic. The first author is a criminologist; the second, a media violence researcher. They fail to cite a single body-relevant media effects study published after 2000, which initially struck me as odd because probably half of the corpus of original research studies demonstrating an effect of media exposure on body image were published post-2000. Then I realized that the cited work is most likely outdated because, well, when you filch other people's writing, you end up citing whatever they cited when they initially published their work.

I've already contacted the book review editor of this journal to tell him there's no way I can provide a balanced book review. Now I get to contact the book's publisher.

Wish me luck.