Nature Precedings forum: topic
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Plagiarism and preprints
Hilary Spencer
Friday, 25 January 2008 23:29 UTC
In the Publishing in the New Millenium forum, Corie Lok asks about a recent paper in Nature by Mounir Errami and Harold Garner. The paper, A tale of two citations, suggests that there is a high level of duplicate papers being published. These papers may illustrate co-submission, plagiarism, or self-plagiarism (which also occurs when papers have different sets of overlapping authors). In a comment, I suggest that preprint servers may help with detection of plagiarism and self-plagiarism prior to publication by providing the full text of articles for journals to check against. (Steven Harnad, Peter Suber , and others have made the same suggestion.)
A 2006 study identified a number of papers posted to the physics preprint server, ArXiv, which copied papers in ArXiv. In 2007, a minor scandal erupted over the discovery that about 30 papers published in low-profile peer-reviewed journals were heavily copied from other papers in ArXiv (see coverage in Nature). Had the original authors not posted their papers to the preprint server, this plagiarism might never have been detected.
However, there is a flip side to this argument, namely that posting one’s paper on a preprint server may facilitate the very plagiarism that it can help to later detect. For many authors, this is a legitimate fear in today’s cut-and-paste climate. Is the risk (of facilitating plagiarism) worth the benefit (of facilitating detection)?
One’s answer might be conditional on whether journals systematically check preprint servers for potential plagiarism. If one is confident that any plagiarism of one’s document is likely to be detected and exposed, then one would perhaps be more comfortable posting early versions of one’s work.
Updated 25 January 2008 23:34 UTC
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Replies
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Another very good reason for preprint servers to make their contents readily accessible by academic search engines like OAIster, Google Scholar and Academic Live, and for readers, editors and manuscript reviewers to look beyond PubMed!
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New detection methods are a great first step, but there needs to be more effective penalties for plagiarists. My own, once-prestigious university copied 100 lines of text absolutely verbatim without permission, attribution or acknowledgement from a published scientific article into a US patent. The original paper was co-authored by a PhD graduate student and university faculty.
Following official complaints, the university investigated itself, and senior administrators deemed such patent creation procedures are standard practice and so there can be no wrong-doing. The university president eventually ruled that patents are not academic documents and so it was not possible for plagiarism to have occurred!! Both the original scientific article (1998) and US patent (filed in 2000, issued in 2003) remain in the public domain. PM me for their citations.
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I think pre-prints help detect plagiarism, but with material being so technical, it is hard. I thought to post this after reading the misconduct story in the 19-Jun-2008 issue of Nature.
I found out from a pre-print that my former advisor had written a paper where 1/3 from “almost” paragraph for paragraph from my dissertation, but he was sole author. I say, “almost” because parts of the data had been omitted, and he combined it with other data making it look like from one experiment, and better than it actually was.
I complained to the journal, who resisted, and then to the university. They made him take out all of my portions from the paper. What was left? What was left was a paper very, very, similar to one he had published 6 months before with, coincidentally, the editor of the journal of the current paper. In fact, if you go paragraph for paragraph in the discussion section of the two papers, all but a few pronouns and adjectives are the same. He first plagiarized me, then he self-plagiarized. The data was the same, though I think there was one small new piece of data. On this self plagiarism / data integrity issue, the university said they don’t get into how a professor uses the data. You can read my full story at http://www.plagiary.org/responses.htm
I did complain to the ORI, but John Dalhberg there said since it probably wasn’t federally funded, and it involved two former collaborators, it probably didn’t meet their definition of plagiarism. On the data issue, he said he could look into it, but that I should go through the university first. I didn’t follow up with him after that.
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… [Dalhberg] said since it probably wasn’t federally funded, and it involved two former collaborators, it probably didn’t meet their definition of plagiarism …
The US federal ORI did not have the authority to investigate the issue because the work was not PHS-funded. But even if it was, I wonder what the outcome would have been. As per ORI documents,
… the definition of plagiarism should expressly exclude authorship and credit disputes … plagiarism is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit …
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One often hears of students and post-docs being unable to persuade the mentor to publish their work — not because the work is not thorough or incomplete, but because the mentor thinks the work is not important enough for any of the journals he likes to publish in.
The reverse happens too, though less frequently: a student refuses to have his work published for any of many possible reasons. What is the mentor to do then? Not being involved with the actual conduct and recording of the many experiments, he faces the difficult task of analyzing data for depiction in tables and figures, etc., for putting in the manuscript. If he uses material from the student’s lab meeting reports, work-in-progress summaries, thesis, etc., could he be plagiarizing? There is also the issue of authorship. I know of one case where in the absence of the student’s participation the mentor had to be the first author.
In any case, the mentor would usually be successful in getting the work published without anyone wondering about it.
But would a student be able to publish his work if the mentor was against it?
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When the dispute is between unequals, like a student and a faculty member, the lesser disputant seems to almost always lose. Some may consider you lucky in being supported by the university.
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You’re right, that I put my advisor in a bind by refusing to publish it. I also enforced it by copyright law.
In my case, my advisor had harassed me a lot, on E-mail, as I got close to finishing. I had to remove myself from the situation. Since it was all on E-mail, I made a nice PDF file of it, which I didn’t think the university wanted to get out in the public. I have never spoken to so terribly in my entire life, and I also have never worked so hard for someone my entire life either. Additionally, I did have the copyright protection, albeit, a little late. Had I paid for the copyright registration when I graduated, for $45, several attorneys said they would have taken on the journal for free. I guess my beef was that when I was a student, my advisor showed no interest in the material. When he knew I was leaving, he was obsessed with me completing an unrelated side project. After I was gone, he took my work.
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I meant to say, I have never BEEN spoken to so terribly in my life.
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I have seen some similar cases.
A student or post-doc works hard on a project that is not the mentor’s favorite one. The mentor, perhaps hoping for ‘exciting’ data, keeps ignoring the importance of timely publication of any type of finding for not just scientific progress but also development of the younger scientist’s career… until the time for the student to leave approaches.
At that stage an embittered person may no longer be interested in the publication because of having been disregarded for long, or because a publication at that point of time would not improve his career prospects.
Nevertheless, as a help to the scientific community, he should try to publish the findings, even if only independently, in theses, pre-prints, open access journals, etc.
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Please see the News and Opinion discussion currently taking place on research integrity, arising from a Commentary “Repairing Research Integrity” in last week’s Nature, with an associated Editorial. The discussion there is highly relevant to the discussion in this thread, and perhaps some of the contributors here would like to comment there.
Repairing research integrity discussion -
I see what Santosh is saying.
I actually had submitted it for publication, but we got rejected right after I finished my dissertation. My advisor had wanted to meet with me privately, and I did. He called me destructive, manipulative, and said he had “let” me graduate (not true – my dept head and dean were ready to go after him if he tried anything). Before meeting with him, I had listened to the book, “When I Say No, I Feel Guilty” by Manual J. Smith 3 times. I simply “fogged,” (agreed with him) and left. He E-mailed me after that, thanking me for agreeing to do all this extra work for him (not true). I drafted a reply and had my department head review, addressing the name calling and so I wasn’t coming near the lab. He replied back, calling me immature for blaming members of the lab and he blind copied members of the lab, who then thought I was talking trash about them. This was the day before hooding and graduation, which, he couldn’t attend since he had travel plans (even though I was his only grad student ever at this school).
I met with the dean and the department head again, and they told me to just go. They said I had done so much for the school, so much for the community, and to remember that. Several months before, I had accepted an industrial job 800 miles away. I was moving, trying to sell a house, graduate, and say goodbye to my friends, and start a new job. I had no time to deal with people who name called me and altered E-mails and blind copied them. Also, he was the only one really publishing in this specific part of the field.
He somehow got my work E-mail 6 months later and sent me messages again asking me to do work, and again, calling me names. At my work, our security department said this constitutes workplace harassment and told me to not respond. At the same time, I called the university’s integrity line, and they did not respond. I thought all was well, until I found my plagiarized paper on Pubmed 5 months later, and acted as I shared before.
I am real happy with my job today. Really happy. My mentors at work told me to drop it — that be thankful I got away from him when I did. I can’t remember if I posted it on this thread, but I saw him a conference not long ago. His talk was awful, darting in many different directions, citing literature 10-15 years ago, and with very little substantial science. In the time since I graduated, I’ve done so much good science, but he has pretty much done nothing.
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