Plagiarism or Plain Survival?

Plagiarism or Plain Survival?

The undersigned have read with interest the excellent article on plagiarism by Sudip K. Das.¹ Although the article deals with the incidence of plagiarism in higher education* that has recently set off some empathetic alarm bells throughout the academic community, its content can undoubtedly be applied to another related problem, that is, plagiarism among non-native English-speaking scientists while writing papers. For a non-native English-speaking scientist, one of the most frustrating comments coming from a manuscript's referee reads as follows: "English is poor." Setting aside the well-known fact that some referees reach this conclusion simply driven by preconceived prejudices regarding the capacity of non-native speakers to write in a foreign language, we wonder: Couldn't it be possible to use a more "refined" expression to state the same fact, such as, "Both the choice of vocabulary and the grammatical structure of the text, in its present...