EDITORIAL COMMENT 



A Point of Professional Ethics 



A recent publication on the seasoning of woods quite transcends the 

 limits of endurance in the freedom of its unacknowledged borrowings 

 from Forest Serv'ice published work. It will probably be necessary 

 to deal with this case of plagiarism by communicating the facts to the 

 scientific, technical, and trade journals. It is, however, far from being 

 the first case in which writers have failed to give due credit to indi- 

 viduals in the Forest Service or to the Forest Service itself for material 

 made use of. Foresters are naturally most interested in the question 

 of professional ethics that is often involved. 



In the scientific world generally writers of standing are scrupulously 

 careful to make acknowledgments for all assistance received and to 

 give full credit whenever material not strictly original is utilized. The 

 jealous solicitude of investigators to protect themselves against possible 

 loss of credit through publication of their results by others is occa- 

 sionally carried to an extreme. In the profession of forestry there has 

 been a great deal of liberality regarding the use of the results of study 

 that would be of common benefit to the profession. There are a num- 

 ber of reasons for this. 



One of the striking characteristics of the profession of forestry has 

 been the relatively strong sense of solidarity which has permeated it. 

 Its members have been knit together by a strong sense of a common 

 public service and a sort of family feeling. This has been partly due 

 to the predominant importance of public forestry, the newness and 

 smallness of the profession, the extent of the personal acquaintance of 

 its members with each other, and the resulting sense of fellowship. 

 Men who are working together as closely as foresters in the United 

 States have worked and are working naturally exchange and to some 

 extent pool their ideas. 



Again, the great bulk of the investigative work done in forestry in 

 the United States has been done in the Forest Service. Published 

 results, as a rule, represent a composite of work, in which are blended 

 the thought of a number of individuals. Studies begun by one man 

 may be taken up successively by several before they take final form, 

 while the process of supervision, direction, and editorial revision may 

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