Scholarly Relations
•Refine, extend, and transmit knowledge
•Truthfulness is both an ethical norm and the basis for rules of academic professionalism
•Accurate summary and acknowledgement of others’ work — shared authorship,citations, discussion within text
•Commitment to intellectual honesty — distortion or misrepresentation of another scholar’s work is always unacceptable.
•Intellectual property rights must be respected
•Refine, extend, and transmit knowledge
•A fiction about fiction — fictional characters are real people
•Accurate summary and acknowledgement of others’ work — shared authorship,citations, discussion within text
•Principle of outsourcing — others’ sources may be declared illegitimate
•Intellectual property rights must be respected
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Wold-Newtonic
Academic
Principle of outsourcing: In Some Unknown Members of the Wold-Newton Family Tree, Jess Nevins claims to have found in the archives of the Historical and Genealogical Museum of Brazoria County, Texas,  three family albums of faded photographs and a leather-bound diary by a person he refers to as “MN” that contain a treasure trove of information about the Wold Newton family. This diary is his primary source of information for his articles, including for the claim that one Walter Carter was John Carter’s nephew, the author of the framing devices in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars series.  In writing “Burroughing Beneath the Page: The Life of Matthew Nicholas Carter,” I wanted to advance another candidate and I discovered that Jess based his description of the Carter nephew on only the first Mars trilogy.  His conclusions didn’t fit the published totality.  So I “outsourced” his diary by claiming that Matthew Nicholas Carter created as gifts for family members a series of “diaries” in which he recorded fictionalized histories of the large family, including photographs both genuine and unrelated to the family; these latter he purchased at various photography studios in the New York and Richmond area and relabeled.  I asserted that Nevins’ source was one of these diaries, and so his conclusions were mistaken.