Getting Work Done

Blogging is rather light so far today because I'm getting academic work done. I read 1.5 pages of Tabari while doing laundry, and while the accuracy was still not quite where I wanted it, it's getting better, and I'm especially happy about how I'm able to get through stuff more quickly. I've also written my encyclopedia article on the Bedouin during the Crusades, which is the one I had to do the most poking around for. I'd earlier finished simple articles on Qalawun (Mamluk Sultan of Egypt from 1279-1290) and the Second Battle of Homs (where Qalawun defeated the Mongols in 1281), and now just have "Turks" left. Encyclopedia articles always make me paranoid about plagiarism, because the standards of what need to be cited are so different from scholarly articles. When I was doing my Greenwood stuff on Africa and the Ottoman Empire I continued to cite obsessively, and still worry that I missed something. The Crusades project came with guidelines specifying quotes and statistics, which I didn't use any of, so I guess I'm ok there.

I think the thing that freaked me out most recently is the note in the Crusades guidelines about having to get the rights to republish long quotes. As an academic, I just think about the citing part, and while I haven't really used any long quotes, it makes me wonder what other business-type things might be lurking out there, especially on the Greenwood project. I have an intense desire not to have my career come to an unhappy end because of a plagiarism scandal for a random reference entry written in grad school. But I figure I'm probably just paranoid.