shakeitoff

@fuzzylogician The part that was identical was a section composed of 2-3 paragraphs. I want to talk to my supervisor about this in the most civil and friendly way possible. I most definitely do not want to file a complaint or argue that he plagiarized my work. We do work with the same theoretical framework so it is hard to argue that one person copied the other. At the same time, I would like to understand why the paragraphs were almost identical. One of my goals in posting was to gauge if this is normal and I'm overreacting. TakeruK - I am not an author on the paper. I would have not thought much of this if I were because I know that repeating your theoretical framework in different papers in more or less the same words happen. All in all I really do have a deep respect for my supervisor and want to resolve the uneasy feeling I have by talking to him about it and I was not sure how I should approach it and if I should do it at all.

Long story short, I was reading my supervisor's recently published article and noticed that a whole paragraph was almost identical to a section of my thesis. I went back to look at the edits that he and I exhanged while working on it and it is fair to say that he made a lot of edits but at the same time it was based off of my writing. There are a few sentences here and there that he added but there are also some that were only slightly edited off my original writing. I am very conflicted because I have a great relationship with my supervisor and do not think that he is the type of person to take students' work. How do I resolve this situation? I now feel the need to massively edit my thesis because I don't want to be charged for plagiarism. But at the same time I don't want to do that because it has been polished to its current state and I like the flow of it. We have a good working relationship so I think I want to talk to him about it but don't want to sound like I'm accusing him of stealing my work. He was a big part in building the idea and editing of my writing so I don't know how to approach this situation. He could argue that it's his idea and edits. I don't know if he wrote the article before or after editing my thesis. It could be that he did it unconsciously...? I know that I sometime write in a similar way if I've been writing on a similar topic. I wonder I should talk to other grad students in my lab, but don't want to color their perception of our supervisor. Any advice would be appreciated!!