upright|thumb|King in 1964
Authorship issues concerning Martin Luther King Jr. fall into two general categories: Plagiarism in King's academic research papers (including his doctoral dissertation) and his use of borrowed phrases in speeches.
Dissertation and other academic papers
Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers were donated by his wife Coretta Scott King to Stanford University's King Papers Project. During the late 1980s, as the papers were being organized and catalogued, the staff of the project discovered that King's doctoral dissertation at Boston University, titled A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, included large sections from a dissertation written by another student (Jack Boozer) three years earlier at Boston University.
As Clayborne Carson, director of the King Papers Project at Stanford University, has written, "instances of textual appropriation can be seen in his earliest extant writings as well as his dissertation. The pattern is also noticeable in his speeches and sermons throughout his career."
Boston University, where King received his Ph.D. in systematic theology, conducted an investigation that found he appropriated
According to civil rights historian Ralph Luker, who worked on the King Papers Project directing the research on King's early life, King's paper The Chief Characteristics and Doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism
was taken almost entirely from secondary sources.
He writes: