Editor's Notes

• Published date: 01 December 2017
• Author: Mark A. Hager
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21294
• Date: 01 December 2017

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N M  L, vol. 28, no. 2, Winter 2017 © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/nml.21294

Journal sponsored by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University.

EDITOR’S NOTES

DECEMBER 2017 MARKS the end of Angela Bies’s second three-year term with the edito-

rial board of Nonprofi t Management & Leadership . Hearty thanks to Angela! She can now

concentrate all of her editorial attention to Nonprofi t and Voluntary Sector Quarterly , where

she serves as co-editor-in-chief.  e waning of 2017 also marks the end of my fi rst three-year

term as editor of Nonprofi t Management & Leadership . In January I will keep my hand on the

rudder and foot on the gas, full speed ahead on a second term.

In my previous editorial, I discussed several issues relevant to Nonprofit Management & Lead-

ership that emerged from Wiley’s convening of editors this past summer. One prominent

issue that I did not discuss then, since it has not been an issue for the journal, is plagiarism

in manuscripts submitted. I am trusting by nature, and I always expect and hope for the best

from my students and colleagues. So, I was not well-prepared when my first substantial case

of plagiarism came through the queue this past fall.

The Spectre of Plagiarism

The notice came from a reviewer, who recognized her own voice in the manuscript she was

critiquing. Chalk one up for my efforts to assign appropriate reviewers to manuscripts: I

was lucky to assign the manuscript in question to a reviewer whose work was being lifted.

How often have I not been so lucky in my reviewing assignments, and plagiarism goes

undetected?

The reviewer did not go so far as to systematically search for overlap between her work and

the manuscript she was reviewing, but she contacted me immediately before completing the

review. She referred to several instances of verbatim sentences, more than one sentence at a

time. I told her to stop her review while I investigated.

Our publisher (Wiley) makes a tool available to editors that is designed to help check for

plagiarized text. The program is called Crossref Similarity Check, which relies on the iThen-

ticate application produced by the iParadigms company. Each manuscript submitted to this

third-party service costs Wiley a fee, so they do not assign it to journals automatically. I had

never asked for iThenticate to be activated for Nonprofit Management & Leadership , so it was

not available when I suddenly needed it. However, iThenticate is marketed as Turn-It-In for

faculty who want to check for originality of student papers, and I have access to Turn-It-In

through my university. I submitted the questionable manuscript to Turn-It-In. The report

uncovered five sentences or groups of sentences that were copied verbatim from a published

paper, totaling about 200 words. What should I do?

I documented the overlaps carefully, and then I started collecting advice. I contacted the

reviewer who was author of the original article to get her impression of the extent of the

violation. I contacted two other journal editors and asked how they would handle this case. I

talked with two scholars from the country from which this manuscript originated so I could

gain understanding of the cultural context for scholarly plagiarism. I asked for advice from a

member of this journal’s editorial board. That editorial board member pointed me to a very