On Monday afternoon, the editor of this blog posted an excerpt of an article authored by one Dr. Gary Busch, entitled “The Misperception of the Russian-Ukrainian Gas Problem.” We have since been notified by John Evans of European Tribune that the article may in fact be a collection of cut-and-paste instances of plagiarism without attribution. I have reviewed the article, and found it significantly lacking in many respects, as well as factually incorrect in many instances. I regret that this blog has presented material of such inferior quality, and I hope readers will take a moment to consider Mr. Evan’s comment outlining the original sources. If Dr. Busch would like to retort, I’d be happy to post any comments.
Dear Mr Amsterdam,
I think you should be aware that the “editorial” by Dr Gary K Busch that you quote here contains unattributed material copy-pasted from other sources.
Several passages of technical information are taken, with neitherattribution nor link, from the US DOE’s Energy InformationAdministration’s Ukraine NatGas page at http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/Ukraine/NaturalGas.html.
They are interwoven with passages lifted from an article first posted by Jérôme Guillet, editor of the European Tribune on Jan 3rd 2009, under the title Ukraine-Russia: some background and context. This article was also posted by Jérôme Guillet on The Oil Drum, of which he is also an editor, and on other sites including DailyKos. A shorter version, which I co-authored with Dr Guillet, was published as an op-ed by the Financial Times on January 6th.
Dr Busch’s article cited above draws a considerable part of itsargument from Dr Guillet’s, as well as substantial textual copiesmasked by minor word-changes. There is no attribution and it is notmade clear that these passages are quotes from another work. Indeed, DrBusch publishes under his own byline alone, leaving it to be supposedthat this is entirely his own work.
Which is sadly not the case.
John Evans
Editor, the European Tribune
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3 Comments
If the article is a cut-and-paste and is factually incorrect in many instances and lacking in many others, doesn’t that mean the source material itself was deeply flawed?Fascinating little soap opera in any event, it would be interesting to have a follow up and see what the original publisher and the author say.
@La Russophobe: It’s true that Robert Amsterdam’s appreciation of the article under Busch’s byline may be read as reflecting badly on the material “lifted” from another author.But why not go read the original at the European Tribune and decide for yourself if it’s “lacking” or otherwise factually incorrect?Busch’s article is composed of, partly, borrowings from Jérôme Guillet’s article, partly, technical details on the Ukraine gas market taken verbatim from the EIA page referenced above, and partly of description of the purported roles of characters such as Firtash and Sechin. This latter portion doesn’t appear to correspond to any source available on Internet, and may well have been written by Busch.
I personally use the http://www.copygator.com website to find plagiarized content. To me it has a number of benefits over copyscape and copyrightspot:1. it’s automated and brings me results instead of me searching for duplicated content. All i had to do was submit my feed and it started monitoring my feed showing me who’s republished my articles on the web.2. i get notified by email so it contacts me when it finds copies of my articles online.3. i use their image badge feature to alert me directly on my website when my content is being lifted.4. it’s a free service as opposed the “per page” cost of copyscape/copysentry.