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In September 2009, the Vice President for Professional Matters, Professor James May, received from a member of the APA, Professor Jenny S. Clay, a complaint that her work and that of others had been plagiarized by Mr. Stephen Evans in his doctoral dissertation, Hymn and Epic: A Study of their Interplay in Homer and the Homeric hymns, which was published by the University of Turku in Finland as volume 244 of the Humaniora series of the Annales Universitatis Turkuensis in 2001.

The APA Statement on Ethics provides that:

The most fundamental ethical obligation of any scholar is to give full and proper credit to all sources involved in research, whether these sources be the published work of other scholars or the unpublished work of students or colleagues. Material taken verbatim from another person’s published or unpublished work must be explicitly identified with reference to its author. Borrowed ideas or data, even if not directly quoted, must be explicitly acknowledged. Revised reprints and translations of earlier work should be identified as such.

Accordingly, the matter was referred to the APA’s Subcommittee on Professional Ethics for an investigation. The Subcommittee found cause to believe that plagiarism had been committed and referred the matter to the Board of Directors, who transmitted the Subcommittee’s findings to the relevant Finnish authorities. The panel appointed by the Rector of the University of Turku to investigate the matter has found the allegations justified. The Rector has accepted the panel’s final report and sent it to the APA for publication.

Statement Approved by the APA Board of Directors
March 24, 2012