Plagiarism by researchers, what can be done?
Posted by Celia Walter | 11 Jun, 2009Plagiarism… what can be done? Simply suffer it?
Prof. Artal, I am a post-doc in the UK. Although I am working now in vision research, I actually did my PhD in a different area and in a different country. I still try to be aware of the new papers appearing in my former research area and of course I like to see how my papers are used, and from time to time cited. Last week, I was having a look of a new paper in a journal (not quite prestigious, but with reasonable reputation in the field) and… I was initially surprised and later devastated to see that in that article several full paragraphs looked too familiar to me… in fact, those paragraphs were identical to those in one of my own papers. The experiments and results… again nearly identical and my paper not even cited. Is anything I can do? Brenda, Birmingham, UK.
Brenda, this is a radical example of plagiarism! I am sure most readers know the definition:
Plagiarism: "direct use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work”
Obviously, the journal that published that paper made a significant mistake, but it is true that often it can be difficult to detect these papers. At least, you should write the editor of both journals informing on the situation. Other than that… well you perhaps can feel flattered to know that some people in the other corner of the world (or perhaps not far from your office!) spend their time just duplicating what you did (without proper credit)!
This is a recurrent and “classic” topic in science and scientist’s ethics and behavior. As in any other life activity, some persons want to make progress quickly (too quick) and they are ready to do anything, even using other’s work. This is obviously unethical and also in some cases can be very risky (in fact when somebody is doing that is ruining the whole career and future). One simple case of plagiarism is to literally copy a previous paper (word by word in some parts) as in Brenda's case. In other situations, more elaborated approaches can be more difficult to discover. In last month editorial, the journal Nature Photonics (http://www.nature.com/nphoton/index.html) nicely touched this issue from different aspects.
...
I think, yes! First, as authors, especially those young ones, my recommendation is to completely avoid copy-paste from other papers into your manuscripts, even in a draft format. Many journals are using now specialized software to track papers by comparing with a database of those previously published. If you are so naive to have your own research, but you try to complete your paper with some paragraphs from other papers... you can be in serious troubles, so completely avoid that. Of course, I am assuming that you properly cite (see a previous post on citation code, http://pabloartal.blogspot.com/2008/10/to-be-cited-or-not-to-be-cited.html ) and that you only decide to write a paper based in your independent research and results.