Thank you for the author's interest and constructive comments on the my short paper titled with "
Unconscious plagiarism and withdrawn of the manuscript under consideration" (1).
Including an element of intent into the definition of plagiarism would allow for some leeway for
unconscious plagiarism or inevitable borrowing of stereotyped words and phrases to be analysed differently from intentional copying or the "knowing presentation" of another's work.
A discussion of Victorian ideas about the mind leads to a reconsideration of
unconscious plagiarism, the communal nature of thought, and the contagion of ideas.
And those mundane influences can have traumatic consequences, as in cases of
unconscious plagiarism. Consider the respected psychiatrist who resigned last year as head of a major psychiatric hospital amid accusations of one of his published papers contained paragraphs with wording identical to that in another researcher's previously published report on the same subject.
