Last week I wrote an item about the recent accusations of plagiarism aimed at the Yale University law professor Ian Ayres, who has acknowledged that several passages in his 2007 book, Super Crunchers, contain unattributed reproductions or nearly identical paraphrases of other sources.

At that time I presented the Columbia University law professor Michael Dorf's theory that many of the recent plagiarism scandals are actually matters of ghostwriting, which stem from an overreliance on research assistants. 

But now comes a compelling new culprit: trade-press editors. According to an anonymous academic who contacted Dorf after his initial post, the most common criticism a trade-press editor makes to academic authors is that they use too many quotations. But according to the editor, the way this works in the line-editing of a manuscript is that "the editor removes quotation marks from a quotation, and changes a little bit of the wording--perhaps only one word!--leaving the sentence structure intact and the citation in place."

Dorf finds the alternative theory plausible and notes that, if it's true, the explanation raises the question of how a trade-press editor could possibly think that minor wording changes relieve an author of the obligation to use quotation marks.