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George Macdonald Ross is right (Letters, August ). The concept of plagiarism is complex and disputed, but perhaps also endemic in academic life as a whole.

In a brief check using Joint Information Systems Committee software, we discovered that a lengthy case study of the experience of a PhD candidate written at Lancaster University 16 years ago has been appropriated to provide about 80 per cent of an account of the life of a US masters student published by a major US state university's staff development unit.

John Wakeford