I dunno. I was in academia for a while and wrote some papers, and in my field at least, the literature review was worthless and really only there to give other people in your field citations. Which is to say that it was not an area of great originality and if you’re citing somebody else’s literature review, you’re really just citing the grammatical structure of the sentence because there’s nothing original in what you’re saying. So I’m not especially bothered by copying a few sentences from there. It just seems a bit sloppy and a bit lazy to me. Which isn’t to say that I’m much of a fan of Gay. And it does seem like the much bigger deal is the thin publication record. Although, at the same time, isn’t administration the natural place for people who don’t like research to go?
