In part 1 of this post, I related the background to this quest, trying to find the meaning of Ivi, when used in a footnote.  I did not know, and my searches were unsuccessful.

In her letter, Ruth had pointed to “Kennedy and Macmillan by Dr. Marco Soddu;” this was the source that her student wanted to use. She wanted to quote a quotation used in the paper, a quotation footnoted as Ivi. page. but who was Ivi?  Did this have the same meaning as Ibid, same source as the immediately previous citation but on a different page?

It took just a few seconds to find the paper.  It is published online in Foreign Policy Journal, and in several formats, including HTML and PDF.  I worked from the PDF version, and that’s where all the screengrabs used here were taken.

Yes, Soddu uses Iyi.  The screengrab (left) is at the foot of page 2.  So, the next thought was to find the original source/s of the quotations marked Ivi, and see if I could follow them up, find the quotation myself? That would guide as to what it means.

Footnote 8 is Ivi, which presumably relates to footnote 7, Ibidem. That presumably relates to footnote 6 – so, back to page 1 we go.

 

The footnotes at the foot of page 1 read:

¹ David Brandon Shields, Kennedy and Macmillan; Cold War Politics, University Press of America, p.9.
² Donette Murray, Kennedy, Macmillan and Nuclear Weapons. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.
³ David Brandon Shields, cit., p.10.
⁴ Ibidem.
⁵ John Dumbrell, A Special Relationship. Anglo American Relations from the Cold War to Iraq, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p.57.
⁶ Ibidem.

and those at the bottom of page 2 read:

⁷ Ibidem.
⁸ Ivi, p.14.
⁹ Ibidem.
¹⁰ Ibidem.
¹¹ Ibidem.
¹² Ibidem.
¹³ Ivi, p.74.
¹⁴ Ibidem.
¹⁵ Ivi, p.79.

 It seems reasonable to suppose that quotations 5, 6 and 7 all come from Dumbrell’s work, page 57. What about quotation 8, cited as “Ivi, p.14“? Does it mean Dumbrell, page 14?

Dumbrell turned out to be a good place to start.  Dumbrell’s book is available on Amazon, complete with the Look Inside! feature. So: check, quotation by quotation.

Quotation 5 from Soddu’s paper;

And here is quotation 5, on page 57 of Dumbrell’s book, as promised.

There is a slight discrepancy: Dumbrell writes ” … which lasted until Kennedy’s early death,” but Soddu’s quotation omits the word “early.” It’s not quite an accurate quotation, but it’s not quite a cause for alarm. Yet.

The plot sickens

It was quotation 6 that really set the alarm sounding:

Ibidem, it says, the same place as citation 5.  But I could not find quotation 6 anywhere on page 57. Nor on pages 56 or 58.  i checked those pages too, in case the Amazon version is slightly different to the edition which Soddu used.  Was I misunderstanding “ibidem“? Might it not refer to the same page of the same source after all? But a search for keywords in this quotation fails to find this paragraph anywhere in Dumbrell’s book. I tried several more of the ibidem quotations that follow in Soddu’s paper, but none seemed to come up in my Look Inside! Dumbrell’s book.

Then I took another look, a closer look, at the paragraph which includes quotation 6.  The  lead-in to the quotation reads:

 As Donette Murray claims in his work Kennedy, Macmillan and Nuclear Weapons, with the exception of Suez:

Let’s take it slowly: although footnote 6 is ibidem – which should refer to Dumbrell (the source in footnote 5), the lead-in to the quotation “Murray claims in his work … ,”  not “Dumbrell claims …”.  Careless writing?  Murray was quotation 2, footnote 2.

But … Donette Murray did not make this claim in HIS work (as Marco Soddu puts it). She made it in HER work: “Donette” is a female name, and Dr Donette Murray is decidedly female – unless he/she has had a life-changing experience not mentioned on her Linked-In page. It seems to be the right Donette Murray – she lists the Kennedy book in her CV…

Dr Murray’s book is not available with a Look Inside! feature, and it’s not available in Google Books either.  Nor in my local library.  Stymied. For the moment.

Hmmm. We’ll come back to Donette Murray later.

Meanwhile, I continued the “Iyi” chase.  The next set of footnotes, numbered 6-31, all presented a problem.  They all read either Ibidem. or Ivi, followed by a page number.  Dumbrell is cited in footnote 5, but the next 25 quotations are not to be found in his book,  ibidem does not refer to him.  Footnote 6 is from Murray’s book.  If all of these footnotes refer to Dr Murray’s work, then they were inaccessible, at least until I can get to a good library.

Reviewing… the situation…

I left this for the moment, and looked for another source cited as Ivi, one which was neither Dumbrell nor Murray.  A few pages further, page 5, we have

³³ Ibidem.
³⁴ Ivi, p.27.
³⁵ http://h-net.msu.edu/
³⁶ Nigel Ashton, cit., p.10.
³⁷ Ivi, p.11.

 

I don’t have online access to Nigel Ashton’s book, either, the work cited as footnote 36.

But I did get access to the source of footnote 35, though not directly nor immediately.  The footnoted URL leads to a web site, not a web page, and the URL given in the bibliography http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/ leads to an error message.  Not helpful.  But a search in Google (for keywords in the quotation in the text) got me there, in fact it pointed to several versions of the text.  Soddu appears to have used http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-diplo&month=0304&week=a&msg=AaFlSbIos0jbPQFcK8Oqkg&user=&pw=  (no wonder he has shortened the URL).

This is not the most readable version.  There are some versions which are more readable.  It turns out that quotation 35 is from  a review of Nigel Ashton’s book – the book which is the cited source for quotations 36 and those following.  The review is by Andrew Preston (even though he is not credited by name in Soddu’s footnotes or bibliography).  Preston’s review is scholarly, written for a scholarly audience. It makes for three dense pages of double-column text in the PRINT version.

Okay: Preston IS credited in the text in the lead-in to quotation 35.  This still isn’t too dangerous, yet; it’s just not quite per convention.  But I am beginning to get worried about Dr Soddu’s sloppy referencing.  What is more, there are more red-flag signals here, such as the misspelling of Ashton’s name, the misuse of the word “volume,” and the correctly copied but ungrammatically phrased “… he writes that Ashton ‘pay great attention… .'”

But this isn’t my main point, here; it is to confirm Soddu’s awareness of Preston’s review.

The nest quotation, superscript 36, is cited as from Ashton’s book. It is a long quotation (almost 10 lines), attributed in Soddu’s text and in the footnote, as Ashton’s words, page 10 of his book. They aren’t. These are Preston’s words, all Preston’s words, from his online review.

Quotation 37, cited by Soddu as Ivi, p. 11, IS from Ashton.  Preston uses this quotation as well, though he gives it as page 10.

Hmmm. They might have been using different editions, mightn’t they?

A little further on, though, we see, Soddu’s text, quotation 41:

This is worrying. The text starts,
           About the Nassau Summit (December 1962) Ashton writes:

in the Kennedy years the nuclear relationship between Britain and America came to be seen as something of a litmus test of interdependence. When Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara scuttled the Skybolt nuclear missile program, which the United States had already promised to the British, and the Kennedy administration subsequently hesitated to replace Skybolt with submarine-based Polaris missiles, Macmillan realized just how unequal the relationship was and how superficial the concept of interdependence had become. Ashton’s conclusions about the Skybolt controversy and the decline of the British strategic deterrent also nicely describe the broader dynamic of Anglo-American relations during the Cold War.⁴¹

and the whole indented paragraph is attributed to Ashton, ibidem – presumably page 11 (or 10?).

But compare that with this, verbatim from Preston’s review:

It is thus difficult to quibble with Ashton’s assertion that “in the Kennedy years the nuclear relationship between Britain and America came to be seen as something of a litmus test of interdependence” (p. 152). When Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara scuttled the Skybolt nuclear missile program, which the United States had already promised to the British, and the Kennedy administration subsequently hesitated to replace Skybolt with submarine-based Polaris missiles, Macmillan realized just how unequal the relationship was and how superficial the concept of interdependence had become. Ashton’s conclusions about the Skybolt controversy and the decline of the British strategic deterrent also nicely describe the broader dynamic of Anglo-American relations during the Cold War:

In short, Preston’s review includes a short quotation from Ashton, p. 152, and then he adds his own thoughts.  Soddu has included Ashton’s quotation and the rest of Preston’s paragraph, and he has attributed it all to Ashton, page 11. Or 10.

It could, of course, be the other way round.  Perhaps Andrew Preston had taken a long paragraph from Ashton’s work but put only the first sentence in quotation marks?  Am I jumping to conclusions?  Perhaps Marco Soddu had used Ashton’s work, genuinely?  Perhaps.

But what about the last sentence in this quotation?  The last sentence of Soddu’s lengthy quotation reads

…..  Ashton’s conclusions about the Skybolt controversy and the decline of the British strategic deterrent also nicely describe the broader dynamic of Anglo-American relations during the Cold War.

There are not many historians who write of themselves in the third-person (though some might occasionally copy-and-paste another writer’s work without bothering to read and correct it).  Reviewers, on the other hand, would be using the author’s name all the time.  My doubts about Dr Marco Soddu are increasing.

Donette, a little gift?

At this point, I got sidetracked – and I got “lucky” too, alas.  I started thinking back to Soddu’s gender confusion when referring to Donette Murray – and, oh dear, here we go again.  Soddu wrote:

The Skybolt crisis of 1962 and its consequences in many ways represented both the discord and the collaboration that have characterized the relationship between Great Britain and the United States since the Second World War.   As Donette Murray claims in his work Kennedy, Macmillan and Nuclear Weapons, with the exception of Suez:

Anglo-American relations were never so starkly and publicly in disarray. As during the period in late 1962 when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara announced the cancellation of the experimental Skybolt air-launched ballistic missile, which had been slated to become the centerpiece of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. In turn, the Nassau agreement that followed the crisis proved to be a milestone in the subsequent development of the special relationship between the two countries.⁶

The “luck” was finding a review of Dr Murray’s book. The review is by John Baylis, and an extract can be found for free on Deepdyve.  The review starts:

The Skybolt crisis and its aftermath in many ways epitomised both the discord and the collaboration that have characterized the relationship between Great Britain and the United States since the Second World War.   With the exception of Suez, Donette Murray argues in Kennedy, Macmillan and Nuclear Weapons, “Anglo-American relations were never so starkly and publicly in disarray” (p. 31) as during the period in late 1962 when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara announced the cancellation of the experimental Skybolt air-launched ballistic missile, which had been slated to become the centerpiece of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. In turn, the Nassau agreement that followed the crisis proved to be a milestone in the subsequent development of the special relationship between the two countries.

Soddu starts his paragraph with a paraphrase of Baylis’s review (which is not cited at all, not in the footnotes and not in the  bibliography).  He includes the 11-word quotation (from Murray’s book) which Baylis quotes in his review, and continues copying from Baylis’s review, ascribing the whole paragraph to Murray.  Or to Dumbrell.

It doesn’t seem to matter, to Dr Marco Soddu, one name is as good as any other.  John Baylis gets not a mention.

In fact, Soddu does this on at least five other occasions: he provides quotations which he claims are from his referenced authors when in fact they are partly or wholly material taken verbatim from reviews of those authors’ works. They are the reviewers’ words, not those of the author being reviewed.

In one last instance, Soddu takes a publisher’s blurb from the back-cover of a book (or it might have been taken from the publsher’s web site) and he quotes from the blurb, attributing it to the author of the book:

So here is the origin of Soddu’s quotation 3, the back cover of Shields’ book.  Once again, thank you, Amazon.

 

It makes you wonder, it makes me wonder.  Has Dr Marco Soddu even read the sources he claims to have used, or has he just used reviews and other secondary sources?

Flawed

Is this plagiarism?  Maybe not.  I haven’t looked at Soddu’s text itself.  Because I was looking for uses of Ivi, my investigation has centred on the quotations he uses, the quotations and their attributions.  If a passage is clearly marked as quotation then there is no attempt to claim those words as his own – even if they are not the words of the writer he attributes them to.

Does that make it plagiarism? It might come down to a matter of definition.

But it is totally unhelpful and totally misleading. The whole paper is flawed, deeply flawed.  It is not honest scholarship, and if it is not honest then it is dishonest.

In all, Soddu has four papers published in Foreign Policy Journal, all published in November and December 2012. He uses that term Ivi in all of them.  At least one of these papers,  JFK and the Media during his Electoral Campaigns (FPJ, December 8, 2012), is just as flawed as the Kennedy/Macmillan paper.  I haven’t looked at the other two. I shall have to if Dr Soddu sues.  Until then…

And we are no closer to Ivi, not yet. In the next post, we’ll be looking at Foreign Policy Journal‘s guidelines for authors, to see if there is any help there.  We’ll be looking at Foreign Policy Journal itself.

And, you’ll be pleased to know (if you’re still reading, you will surely be pleased to know), we solve – I think – the mystery of Ivi.

Part 3 follows.