Some forms of plagiarism are more difficult to discover than the standard copy-and-paste variant. In his recent book, Michael V. Dougherty (2020) investigates various forms of what he calls disguised plagiarism, i.e., plagiarism concealed by other means than just the lack of attribution to the true author. He also introduces a useful terminology for different forms of disguise. Readers of Theoria are already acquainted with Dougherty's work on translation plagiarism (Dougherty, 2019). Let us have a close look at two of his other categories, dispersal and template plagiarism. Some plagiarists plagiarize a book, not by copying it in one piece, but by publishing various parts of it – often whole chapters – as journal articles. This seems to reduce the risk of discovery, and the plagiarizer can add a sizeable number of journal articles to his CV. Dougherty exemplifies dispersal plagiarism with three remarkable cases from philosophy. In 2003, Hans Kribbe obtained his PhD from the London School of Economics with a thesis in political philosophy, Corporate Personality: A Political Theory of Association (Kribbe, 2003). He did not attempt to get the chapters published as articles, since he believed that they could not be published without significant revision. He had taken up a new job and did not have the time for this. But he was wrong. His chapters could in fact be published without revision. Several years later he learned that a professor at an English university had published six articles, consisting almost entirely of text from his thesis.11 References to these and other plagiarizing texts referred to here can be found in Dougherty (2020). I follow the practice of not citing such texts directly, when it is possible to cite instead an easily accessible source in which the exact reference is given. The purpose of this practice is to avoid adding to the plagiarist's citation statistics. But the professor in question had published these texts in his own name, instead of Kribbe's. In fact, he published the first chapter of Kribbe's thesis three times in his own name, in three different journals. The only significant difference between the articles was that they had (very) different titles, which gave the impression that they dealt with quite different subject matter. This must have been an almost unbeatably effortless way to get three published journal articles on one's CV: copy a text written by someone else, invent three different titles, and send it to three journals. However, the plagiarist took the trouble to read through the chapter and make the minimal changes necessary to convert it into a journal article, such as changing “in this chapter” to “in this article” (Dougherty, 2020, pp. 53–62). In an interview, Kribbe said: “I guess he must have known I since left the academic world altogether to pursue other things, so he was unlikely to ever get caught. Easy pickings” (Oransky, 2019). This particular plagiarist may have some expertise in how to get away with theft. He is a professor of criminology. In Dougherty's second example of dispersal plagiarism, the appropriated text was Ilkka Kantola's (1994) book Probability and Moral Uncertainty in Late Medieval and Early Modern Times. In the years 1999–2005 a plagiarist published seven journal articles and book chapters that were based on Kantola's book. This plagiarist is a European philosophy professor who has also plagiarized many other authors. He might hold a record for prolific plagiarism: Dougherty reports that in a period of 14 years he has published 45 articles and chapters containing extensive plagiarism (Dougherty, 2020, pp. 62–67). The third example of dispersal plagiarism in philosophy is at the same time an example of translation plagiarism. It was directed at Wolfgang Wieland's (1982) book in German on Plato. In 2002, a European communications researcher published a book chapter that consisted almost entirely of translated text from Wieland's book. This was followed by one more book chapter and two journal articles that include large unattributed portions of the book. The same person has also plagiarized texts by several other authors (Dougherty, 2020, pp. 67–71). [The text from 2013] exhibits verbatim and near-verbatim overlap with the preface to the 2000 volume. There are two significant changes, however. The term “the Western Balkan countries” replaces the term “Africa” throughout … and the longer term “organized crime and corruption” replaces “corruption”. (Dougherty, 2020, p. 129) [He] reacted strongly when a reporter asked if he had committed plagiarism. “I'm not going to be roped into defending something I don't think is in need of defense,” he replied. Any blame, as he sees it, should rest with the publisher. If it failed to credit Mr. Beal and Mr. Deal, then that is Routledge's problem, not his. “I don't consider this to be my fault… It was never presented to me as something I would need to think about.” (Bartlett, 2008) Whereas verbatim plagiarism is often relatively easy to detect, the various forms of disguised plagiarism are much more elusive. For instance, standard text-matching software cannot discover translation plagiarism, and it often fails to disclose compression plagiarism (in which a long text is compressed into a much shorter one). Exposing disguised plagiarism is therefore an advanced form of scholarly “detective work”. Dougherty tells us many of the tricks of that trade: In his book, Dougherty reports two remarkable achievements in this type of scholarly detective work. One of them is the disclosure of fabricated fieldwork data. Fieldwork is an essential method in several branches of social science. However, the information it provides is usually difficult for others to verify. Contrary to experiments, fieldwork cannot usually be replicated, and contrary to quotations from written sources, quotations from fieldwork interviews or observations cannot usually be looked up in a library. There are often good reasons to anonymize informants, which means that they cannot be contacted for follow-up questions. Interviews and conversations can be recorded, but some informants do not accept being recorded. Therefore, we usually have to rely on the truthfulness of the researcher, and as Dougherty (2020, p. 143) says, “[p]roving that a researcher's publications are the product of fabricated, fraudulent, or inaccurate fieldwork data is typically not possible”. But in one case he succeeded in doing so. In 2013, a researcher published a journal article on the Macedonian democratization process. (This is the same person whom we encountered above as converting another researcher's study of corruption in Africa into a study by himself on human security in the Western Balkans.) It was ostensibly based on fieldwork performed in February 2011. However, a sentence of 18 words, which he attributed to an anonymous Macedonian activist, coincided verbatim with a passage in a 2011 report from a group of researchers to the European Union. There it was not featured as a quotation but as part of the authors' own analysis (Dougherty, 2020, pp. 136–137). Another quotation, also allegedly from a fieldwork interview, was a slightly modified passage from the same report (Dougherty, 2020, pp. 137–138). In 2016, the same researcher published an article on governance in Serbia, which claimed to be based on fieldwork interviews in Belgrade in March 2014. Dougherty was able to trace four alleged fieldwork quotations to their true sources. One of these passages is of particular interest (Dougherty, 2020, pp. 141–142). It first appeared in an essay published in 2012 by Nalin Jayasuriya in the Sri Lankan newspaper FT Daily. Our plagiarist has used it twice: first in a 2013 article where it is part of what appears to be his own text, and then in the 2016 article where it is presented as a statement made in 2014 by an anonymous representative of a non-governmental organization in Belgrade. More troubling, however, is the apparent denial of a voice to vulnerable populations covered in the articles. If the reported fieldwork quotations are unreliable, then true spokespersons of vulnerable populations are not represented in articles that are meant to form the basis of policy recommendations for these populations. One benefit of properly performed qualitative research is to give a voice to marginalized populations whose perspectives would otherwise be missed through other forms of research. (Dougherty, 2020, p. 146) The other remarkable achievement reported in this book is the disclosure of a ghost-writer. A ghost-writer is a person who anonymously writes a text to be published in someone else's name. Ghost-writing is an acceptable practice in cases when the nominal author speaks on behalf of an office or an organization. It is generally accepted that politicians and leaders of large organizations have ghost-writers, usually called speechwriters, and that judges employ law clerks, who write judgments and other legal documents for them. There is also a similar tradition in the Catholic church, in which members of the higher echelons often employ ghost-writers to compose magisterial texts. On the other hand, ghost-writing is unacceptable in research, due to the importance of personal responsibility and correct crediting in academic work. For instance, although it may be appropriate for the President of a university to employ a ghost-writer for her ceremonial speeches, she should certainly not use such services for a scholarly text. Ghost-writing involves particular risks relating to publication ethics. A person who does not expect to be held personally accountable for a text may be more willing to resort to convenient but illicit means to compose it. As we have noted earlier in Theoria, this is a plausible mechanism behind some of the plagiarism in PhD theses by public figures in Germany (Hansson, 2015). Apparently, some persons who needed a PhD for their non-academic career employed ghost-writers to write their theses. Given the nature of the task, such a ghost-writer may have no qualms about pilfering texts from others. As some of Dougherty's examples indicate, there may also be similar problems in cases when ghost-writing is not per se inappropriate (Dougherty, 2020, pp. 75–101). Several writings by the prominent Canadian cardinal Marc Ouellet (currently prefect of the Congregation of Bishops) contain passages taken without attribution from other writers. Dougherty describes this as the outcome of a ghost-writer's use of “patchwork plagiarism methodology, drawing passages from several sources” (Dougherty, 2020, p. 86). However, in an article published in Ouellet's name in 2008, a single text source has a dominant role. Almost 18 per cent of it is taken, with no or very small changes, from an essay from 2003 by the American Lutheran pastor Mary W. Anderson (Anderson, 2003; Dougherty, 2020, pp. 89–91). The extensive use of texts by a female Protestant priest in a magisterial Catholic text is interesting, but unfortunately it is unacknowledged and therefore also not explained. Often the same sentences inexplicably appear in works by [the Plagiarizing Priest] and Ouellet's ghostwriter. Sometimes the directionality of the migration of the idiosyncratic sentences is from Ouellet's ghostwriter to [the Plagiarizing Priest]… But sometimes sentences migrate in the opposite direction, from an initial appearance in a work by [the Plagiarizing Priest] to a later writing by Ouellet's ghostwriter. (Dougherty, 2020, p. 95) But there is more to this example. One of the texts that Cardinal Ouellet's ghost-writer misappropriated had been published by another prominent American cardinal, William Levada (1936–2019). Like his colleague, Levada seems to have employed a plagiarizing ghost-writer. About a third of an article by Cardinal Levada from 2007 was taken without attribution from an article published in two different journals in 2000 and 2002 by the Benedictine priest and theologian Jeremy Driscoll (Dougherty, 2020, pp. 76–81). (Incidentally, the 2002 version does not mention the 2000 version, so this was a case of undisclosed duplicate publication.) When writing an article for Cardinal Ouellet, which was published in 2007, his ghost-writer plagiarized a text from Cardinal Levada's article earlier that year, which was in fact plagiarized from Driscoll's text from 2000. Since surrounding text was also appropriated, there can be no doubt that Ouellet's ghost-writer took the text from Levada's article rather than directly from Driscoll (Dougherty, 2020, pp. 81–85). Obviously, such chains of plagiarism can make it next to impossible to determine who is the actual author of a text. One may well ask how important all this is. The accuracy and general quality of a text is important, but why is it important to know who wrote it? This is not only a question of honouring or criticizing the right persons for scholarly products. An even more important reason to keep track of authorship is that we often need to know the origin of a text in order to understand its context and its unstated assumptions, and to form an opinion on the potential biases and conflicts of interest of its author. This is also a major reason why ghost-writing is not acceptable in scientific and scholarly contexts. Another important reason to keep track of authorship is that inaccurate claims of authorship almost invariably come with inaccurate claims about when the text was written. When you read a recent scholarly article you expect it to take recent research into account. If it was compiled from plagiarized texts that are considerably older, then this will not be the case. Some forms of plagiarism, in particular template plagiarism, are closely connected with false and fabricated data. We saw above how a template plagiarist created a text on security in the Balkans by exchanging words in a text on corruption in Africa. A reader who turns to this text for information about the Balkans becomes a victim of fraud. Translation plagiarism often leads to unreliable indirect translations. Dougherty shows this in an example where a plagiarist appropriated a German text, which he translated into English. The German text contained quotations from ancient Greek sources, translated directly from Greek into German. The plagiarizer translated the German into English, but the reader was left with the impression that the translation had been made directly from ancient Greek (Dougherty, 2020, pp. 22–23). Indirect translations are usually considered to be less reliable than direct ones, and they should normally not be used for scholarly purposes when (as in this case) a good direct translation is available. At any rate, the reader should be informed of the source from which the translation was made. Concealed indirect translations are not acceptable (Elgül, 2019). For all these reasons, plagiarism in scholarly literature should not be tolerated. To the contrary, it should be disclosed, so that the scholarly record can be corrected. Disguised Academic Plagiarism is an important contribution to this endeavour, both through its concrete disclosures and – even more importantly – through all the methodological advice that it provides.