One of my biggest fears when writing is that I include a quotation from some other source, and inadvertently drop the attribution. Generally with law reviews, fastidious editors catch all such errors. However, book editors–even at academic presses–do not provide nearly the same level of attention. It is entirely up to the author, and the blame is the author’s alone.
As an act of pure introspection, I submitted both Unprecedented and Unraveled through Quetext, an online plagiarism detector. The system matches every word in my book and compares it to billions of sources available online. It is a harrowing experience to check yourself, but one that I felt duty-bound to do.
As best as I can tell–and there are thousands upon thousands of sources–in cases where there is a 100% match, I used quotation marks and attributed the actual source. Often, many of the matches are for articles I wrote myself. (See Self-Plagiarism.) But I have not gone through every single page as closely as I should. In the interests of full disclosure, I post the PDF reports here:
- Unprecedented: Parts I, II, III, and IV
- Unraveled: Chapters 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33
Unprecedented never made it to a second printing, but Unraveled will. If you spot something that you think warrants further attention, please flag it. I will be sure to publish my next book through this system before it is published.