Manuel, a UMA graduate, works for a healthcare practice. The office manager asks

Question

Manuel, a UMA graduate, works for a healthcare practice. The office manager asks Manuel to research some online articles and create a report by next Monday. The topic of the report is heart disease prevention.

Compare a portion of Manuel’s report (below):

When it comes to heart disease, it's not who you know -- it's who you came from. Heart disease is hereditary, so if you're dealt a bad card by those further up the family tree, you need to embrace a healthy lifestyle and steer clear of smoking, heavy drinking and poor dietary choices. All the money, fame and influence in the world won't make it OK for you to eat bacon cheeseburgers if there's a history of heart disease in your family.

While celebrities often take a pass on some of life's more unpleasant experiences (cleaning bathrooms, for one), no one has immunity against heart disease and heart attacks.

In this article, we'll talk about five celebrities who had heart attacks. Of the five, some lived, some died, and some saw the light and adopted a heart-healthy lifestyle and attitude

Now Answer the following questions:

1. Explain why you believe Manuel did or did not plagiarize in his report. Support your answer with information from this week’s readings and modules.

2. Is Manuel using a credible source? Provide specific examples to support your opinion.

3. Imagine you are Manuel’s manager. Provide feedback about Manuel’s process by explaining what he could do differently in the future.

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Explanation / Answer

Note: This response is in UK English, please paste the response to MS Word and you should be able to spot discrepancies easily. You may elaborate the answer based on personal views or your classwork if necessary. Also, you may have to change the first answer based on your week’s reading.

(Answer) (1) This article does not seem to be plagiarised, from a credible source at least. If one closely looks at the abstract, the writer beings with talking about how heart disease is predominantly hereditary. He talks about how an unhealthy lifestyle causes heart diseases and how no amount of money in the world can change one’s genes.

However, heart disease is a combination of both nature and nurture. In other words, it can be easily caused by faulty genes and an unhealthy lifestyle. Secondly, the writer simply goes on to enlist celebrities with heart disease without talking about the medical history or family history of these celebrities. This would go astray from the initial reasoning that heart disease is mostly in the genes. It could be that an unhealthy lifestyle caused these celebrities to have heart disease and not poor genetics.

Since scholarly articles will not generally be so abrupt with so many loopholes, it can be assumed that the article wasn’t plagiarised.

(2) It doesn’t seem to look like Manuel is using a credible source. The abstract seems to foreshadow that the article would impetuously jump from one concept to another without concluding the previous thought.

If the writer wants to talk about the correlation between bag genes and heart disease, it would require that he talks about studies of heart patients with and without the family history of heart disease. These quantities could be compared with a simple correlation coefficient and the differences could be found. Instead, the writer turns the article about heart disease into a “fluff piece” by enlisting celebrities and their lifestyle before and after heart disease.

(3) Manuel need not have to get out into the field, conduct surveys and a tedious research in order to prove that the cause of heart disease leans more towards “nature” than “nurture.” Manuel can simply cross-tabulate data from an experimental group of people with heart disease and bad genes and a control group of people with heart disease and healthy genes.

Such data can be found in several studies of the past as this is a concept that has been explored multiple times. In consulting viable data and resources, Manuel would be able to present a tangible study about heart disease and its major causes that can actually be referenced by patients and doctors.

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