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I know a professor who has recently written two books which are used as textbooks/academic books. However, I spotted a pretty recurrent pattern of plagiarism. They copy sentences and sometimes paragraphs up to several hundred words from Wikipedia, other articles, books, reports without referring to that work through both of the books. Often when they do copy, they include the references they copy (e.g. they copy A which refers to B and C), and they keep the references to A and B.

Is this in any way considered common practice? I obviously think not, but I am interested to ask whether I am simply too draconian in this regard.

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    No, this is not acceptable. Textbooks are definitely works in which attribution of other people's work is expected and required. – user2390246 Jul 14 '16 at 9:54
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    Plagiarism is plagiarism and as such not acceptable. In any publication. – skymningen Jul 14 '16 at 10:06
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    Thanks for your comments. I know this is the case, and I was only really looking for confirmation of it. I'm just disappointed knowing this is a reputed Professor and he will be protected if I ever did anything with this – user1778351 Jul 14 '16 at 10:21
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    Once I was accused of copying from Wikipedia in an answer I posted to math(dot)stackexchange(dot)com, when in fact I had written the Wikipedia article myself. Might that have happened in the case of this professor? – Michael Hardy Jul 16 '16 at 14:52
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    By textbook do you mean something they're taking to a publisher to sell? Or do you mean internal lecture notes? And if so, what is the level of the course? – Jessica B Aug 12 '16 at 5:36
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Replicating large portions of material from other books without permission; copying major portions of published work without citation -- this is blatantly plagiarism at all angles. This is downright unacceptable unethical practice.

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  • The question was really: Is plagiarism acceptable in this situation? – gnasher729 Aug 11 '16 at 22:16

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