The accusations mark a troubling growth in the use of plagiarism as a political weapon.

published writings on nearly 50 occasions without proper citation. Oxman acknowledged mistakenly omitting quotation marks in four paragraphs in her 2010 doctoral dissertation, after Business Insider reported that she lifted multiple passages from Wikipedia and other sources without proper citation. (Oxman has not responded to all of the allegations but has said she will check her citations and request any necessary corrections.)

Conservative activists opposed to Harvard’s diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and the conservative-leaning Washington Free Beacon first reported the allegations against Gay when she was under scrutiny for botching an answer about antisemitism at a congressional hearing. The accusations against Oxman emerged after Ackman pushed for Gay’s resignation. In both cases, there may have been political motivations involved in digging up the revelations. That does not necessarily make them irrelevant.

But technology has made it possible for anyone to seek out plagiarism. While plagiarism detection software is not particularly reliable, it is becoming more widely used as a tool that, with additional checks by humans, can identify passages of text that are identical or similar to other published works. And that makes it increasingly likely that there will be a troubling explosion of borderline or illegitimate accusations of plagiarism as a political weapon.

Plagiarism is wrong and academic misconduct by researchers needs to be identified and called out. Researchers who mistakenly omit citations should have to correct the record. Those who intentionally lift large chunks of another scholar’s words, ideas, or analysis without attribution should face professional penalties.

What becomes problematic is if minor, decades-old research mistakes get dredged up as a way to quash the careers of politically unpopular academics.

It is also problematic if sanctions are meted out inequitably. At Harvard, some questioned whether students faced stricter standards than Gay. Jonathan Bailey, who runs a blog on plagiarism called Plagiarism Today, said students have long complained that a minor mistake can hurt a student’s academic career, while a more serious issue revealed after graduation has fewer ramifications. Institutions can face challenges in treating allegations of plagiarism similarly across departments.

“I worry this is like racial profiling and policing,” said Charles Seife, director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. “Even if on a case-by-case basis you are judging the crime fairly, you might have a systemic injustice because of where the scrutiny gets applied.”

The best way for universities to prepare for potential accusations is by setting up a school.

While having transparent, equitable standards for weighing allegations and meting out sanctions is important, the question becomes what those standards look like, since cases of plagiarism can be vastly different from one another. There is a distinction between stealing another researcher’s original ideas and copying boilerplate technical language. Plagiarism can encompass cases where sources are not cited or are improperly cited. It can involve faculty taking credit for a student’s work.

Sanctions meted out for plagiarism can and should be different if someone acted intentionally versus made a mistake, and if someone plagiarized once or many times. It could be reasonable for a university to not punish attribution mistakes made by a researcher decades earlier, if their subsequent work was properly attributed, but the university may still want to require the researcher to correct the earlier paper to ensure the scholarly record is accurate.

Researchers in the United Kingdom in 2010 created a point scale which ranked the severity of plagiarism based on the number of instances of plagiarism, how much of a work was plagiarized, the student’s level in school, the value of the assignment to the student, and additional factors like whether the student tried to hide the offense. Bailey points to this as a potential model, although it was never widely adopted.

There are ways for colleges to proactively avoid plagiarism. Ivan Oransky, cofounder of RetractionWatch, a blog that tracks journal retractions, said universities could do “spot checks” on employees’ published research so researchers know their work has a chance of being scrutinized.

Daniel Swinton, an educational consultant who was previously assistant dean of academic integrity at Vanderbilt University, said some schools give plagiarism checking tools to faculty so they can voluntarily check their research for citation mistakes. He said that can avoid the “lower level, non-intentional, or lazy sorts of behaviors” that can lead to plagiarism charges for inadvertent mistakes.

Swinton said having a centralized research integrity office, rather than letting each department handle allegations against its faculty, can also increase standardization. That office can then create a rubric to determine how different levels of misconduct are addressed so a typographical error like omitting quotation marks is corrected but treated less severely than if someone lifts the central idea of another researcher’s paper.

Plagiarism is wrong, and sometimes it should be career-ending. Other times it involves a sloppy mistake, one worth correcting, learning from, and improving on in the future. A good system for addressing plagiarism will be able to distinguish one from the other.