Last November I attended the MRS meeting and one of my students presented a poster – you can see it here. It won a mention for the best poster in its category but not the overall prize. The content of the poster was written up as a paper and offered to a well respected journal with initial letters N M, who declined it as is there right and it is now under consideration for publication elsewhere.
Today, I received an e-mail from a colleague that said, “Have you seen the latest edition of the JoM? It has a plot very similar to one you showed to me at the MRS meeting”. I looked up the article (subscription required) and there in figure 3 is a remarkably similar plot to the one we presented. The author of this paper was present at the MRS meeting and I spoke to him about our work. He made some comment about the plot being the sort of visualisation that was very useful.
I have just e-mailed him to enquire whether he remebers our poster. I await his reply.
My question is: What should be done if this colleague has either intentionally or unintentionally stolen your work? Are they just using your idea with different data or is it your same data in the plot? What would you want to happen if you have indeed been plagiarised?
I had something similar happen with a presentation. I gave a ppt talk which was posted to a site where people could watch it again or download it if they wanted to. Soon thereafter a colleague presented a topic on a similar subject. They had taken my ppt and changed the “theme” colors etc and swapped some stuff around, but it was essentially my talk. This was for a class so I brought it up privately to the professor. He determined through the properties that it was my talk (because it has my name as author of the slide show) but decided that the overall content was different enough not be be total plagiarism. It still bothers me, because I really did not agree!
It may be tht the idea was reached independently before our poster but it would have been nice to have been acknowledged in the paper. It would also have been nice to have had some advance warning of their intention to publish.
Can’t access journals through Athens, and would be interested to see a direct link to see the other paper. But that plot of yours really is at the core of your paper, and it will be obvious to anyone seeing it (and easy to do similar analysis yourself). What are the submission dates like? (for what it’s worth, at least we did not hold up the process too much)
The sad conclusion of something like this is however the fact that fewer and fewer people are presenting latest results at big meetings like this. Many wait until either the paper is already in final stages of publication, or already published. That depreciates the value of such gatherings. It can be different for smaller workshops, which is why generally prefer to go to the smaller meetings.
How galling. Would one option be to upload your poster presentation to a recognized preprint server, so it is date-stamped (version controlled)? (Similarly, Mary, slide presentations can be uploaded to a site such as SlideShare.) Then at least if one is scooped, one has documentation of what one presented, and when. Although I am sure the practice you describe is not new, this makes it no less defensible.
Hi Joerg – My informant also believes his ideas presented at the meeting (and commented on by the author of the paper in question during discussion) have also appeared in the JoM paper without acknowledgement. The JoM article is a short overview of published work and only concerns fcc metals (which was the scope of our poster) JoM does not publish a submission date and I think it tends to invite presentations as it is the house journal of the TMS. Our current submission (which I now guess will be rejected as it has been preceded) develops the correlation further to other crystal structures and this further development that was not reported at the MRS meeting is not in the JoM paper.
A sad fact is that this has put me off presenting our latest results on TEM studies of nanowires at a meeting in 2 weeks time until it is accepted by a Journal!
Bad luck Brian – it does sound (smell?) fishy. A similar thing happened to me a few years back, though in that case what I perceived to be a replicate of information we had presented in a poster turned up a few months later in a manuscript that I was re-reviewing (the ‘new’ experiment wasn’t in the original version). Although I couldn’t formally prove anything, I at least had the chance to raise my concerns with the editor, and the time to quickly complete and submit our own manuscript. It was very annoying. Plus, it has made me very circumspect about releasing new information in that form.
I have had a reply from the author and he was able to provide evidence for independent invention. I just wish he had said that at the conference where we talked about it and I would not have wasted so much time on this!
Remember? He has a copy of the poster in his bedroom.
Sorry to hear that Brian. A very similar thing happened to a postdoc in my lab and he opted out of every poster session since then. I hope it doesn’t discourage your student (as impossible as that is).
Date stamping posters on preprint servers like Nature Precedings is a good idea – at least you can prove you also had that particular idea when someone else publishes the same, and that you have presented it earlier (the date stamp does not say when you actually had that idea).
With digital cameras now available in most mobile phones, scooping from posters or from presentation slides becomes increasingly easy for those who don’t like to collect their own data. Did you realize there is software and shareware available to
ripextract data values fromsomeone else’s hard worka published graph?