Our Professional Responsibility to Avoid Plagiarism—First Quarter 2025
Our Professional Responsibility to Avoid Plagiarism
Steve McDonald, CVA
NACVA Ethics Oversight Board Member
When I think about plagiarism, I usually think about it in the context of scholarly or academic endeavors. And, in that context, it is most often about recognizing (or not) the literary rights of an original author. But as long as academic or scholarly research includes sufficient attribution when borrowing the content of an original author, the offense of plagiarism is avoided.
However, the scope of plagiarism can include an offense against the literary rights of an original author and the property rights of a copyright owner. It involves more than just pirating the exact wording of another author without sufficient attribution. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, to plagiarize is the taking of someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own. So plagiarism can also include the subtle abuses of pirating another person’s distinctive and significant modeling or research, data or findings, or conclusions and interpretations, and presenting as them as your original work.
I believe this poses a unique challenge for the valuation and appraisal profession. In my opinion, valuation and appraisal development is based on building cumulative knowledge, and the development of professional standards that promote a high level of consistency among many disparate assignments and authors. As more and more valuation and appraisal work conforms to development standards, and as more and more knowledge is disseminated to a wider audience, it loses some of its distinctive, original references; what belongs to whom clearly becomes less distinct.
For example, who owns or created discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis? Historical research suggests that DCF calculations have been used in some form as early as the first time money was provided as a loan with interest, possibly ancient Egypt. In modern history, Irving Fisher and John Burr Williams published books in the 1930s formally expressing DCF in economic terms (Source: Wikipedia). However, I have never reviewed a valuation report that considers an income approach using DCF that provides a reference to the original author of the concept. By the same token, the lack of some credit or reference about the development of DCF as an economic concept does not imply that every valuator expressly presents DCF as their own idea, but clearly its origins are not a focus.
So is it plagiarism to “borrow” a discounted cash flow model without acknowledging who developed the original concept? I suspect most would agree that the DCF concept has been in the public domain for so long that there are no literary rights or copyrights that require protection. It is taught in every basic finance class along with present value analysis. It is a quintessential “go-to” model for estimating the value of something that creates economic benefits.
But where we need to be careful as professionals is when we gain access to work product or examples of work product, either directly or indirectly, that may help improve our own work. When I think about this, I have to pause, mainly because I have found instances where I see how someone describes an approach to the cost method, income method, or market method that I think is much better than my narrative and I make changes to my reporting based on those experiences. Or possibly some of the standard statements or qualifiers that are required by our professional standards are more eloquently presented and I adopt the same wording.
Again, I do not think this rises to the level of plagiarism because how many different ways can you say “I have no financial interest in ...” or “I am under no obligation to ...”. Our professional standards will tend to lead reports to a level of consistency and the possibility of exact wording between disparate assignments and authors. It becomes more of an issue when the majority of a report or analyses are “borrowed” with little attempt to create anything original. This includes work that an individual may have contributed to, even significantly, but was performed as an employee. This comes back to valuation and appraisal development based on building cumulative knowledge. Most cases of new valuators developing knowledge and experience involves the employment with a firm, company, or sole proprietor. In those cases, we have an ethical responsibility to respect copyrights of the employer, even with significant contribution to the development of work product.
No matter what the context, the best professional practice for avoiding plagiarism is to perform the work originally and only present work product you have rights to. The second line of defense against plagiarism is for an organization to clarify and uphold our ethical standards.
