HealthyPlace bills itself as a large mental health website, claiming its the largest online (although ComScore, an independent Internet traffic measuring service disagrees, pegging its US audience at only 135,000 — just 16 percent of Psych Central’s US audience). It’s certainly been around for many years.
Yet for such a large website (and HealthyPlace previously lost its HON accreditation just three years ago), it sure appears to play fast and loose with content attribution.
“Content attribution” means simply that when you are reprinting content from other websites, you properly attribute and credit that source as the author of the article. Many websites are guilty of taking other people’s content and not giving proper attribution — it’s a common problem for online publishers. But most publishers work hard to ensure all content is properly attributed and, if need be, links back to the original website are included (a common requirement).
But I’ve never seen such wholesale copying and pasting (known in the business as copypasta) as what is done on HealthyPlace. Some people might call this wholesale plagiarism, but I will give HealthyPlace the benefit of the doubt and just say they must have simply forgotten to put in the attributions and gotten the proper permissions.
Below, you will find just a few dozen of the articles we found — with little actual research — that violate other websites’ and authors’ copyright and are published on HealthyPlace without attribution.