"Plagiarism is almost always a symptom of other educational problems"

Science publishing: How to stop plagiarism - NATURE

2012-01-06T13:08:00.008+02:00

Nature 481, 21–23 (05 January 2012) doi:10.1038/481021a

Duplication is easily detected by software, yet it remains a problem. Ten experts explain how to stamp it out.

Harold Garner: Flag plagiarized studies
Bernd Pulverer: Spot subtle forms
Ana Marušić & Mladen Petrovečki: Check all manuscripts
John Loadsman: Use professional translators
Yuehong Zhang & Ian McIntosh: Blacklist repeat offenders
Sandra Titus: Invest in prevention
Miguel Roig: Teach scientists to paraphrase
Melissa Anderson: Catch system gamers
References

The Year of the Retraction: A look back at 2011

2011-12-30T07:46:00.005+02:00

If Retraction Watch was actually a business, as opposed — for the moment, anyway — to a labor of love for two guys with day jobs, 2011 would have been a very good year for business.

It was a year that will probably see close to 400 retractions, including a number of high-profile ones, once the dust settles. Those high numbers caught the attention of a lot of major media outlets, from Nature to NPR to the Wall Street Journal. Science publications, including LiveScience and The Scientist, have done their own end-of-year retraction lists.

It was also a good year for us at Retraction Watch. Many news outlets featured us in their coverage, either picking up stories we’d broken or asking us for comment on big-picture issues. Three national NPR programs — Science Friday, On the Media, and All Things Considered — had us on air. We launched a column in LabTimes, and Nature asked us to write a year-end commentary. We even earned a Wikipedia entry.

All of that has contributed to the fact that sometime today, we’ll surpass 1.5 million pageviews. We’ve tapped into a passionate and helpful community of readers, without whom much of Retraction Watch wouldn’t be possible. You send us great tips, add valuable commentary, keep us honest by correcting our errors, and encourage us at ever step.

So: Thank you.

Now, which journals had the most retractions?

By our unofficial count, the winner would appear to be the Journal of Biological Chemistry, with 15. Those tended to come in groups, with four from Silvia Bulfone-Paus’s lab, four from the late Maria Diverse-Pierlussi’s group, three from Jesse Roman’s lab, and two from Zhiguo Wang’s. One of the other two was from Harvard cancer researcher — and New Yorker staff writer — Jerome Groopman’s lab. There are four more on the way from Ashok Kumar’s University of Ottawa lab, although it looks as though those will actually appear in 2012.

We covered seven in Blood, eight in the Proceedings of the National Academy Sciences, and eight in the Journal of Immunology.

Science had five, including two very high-profile ones, longevity genes and chronic fatigue syndrome-XMRV, compared to just two last year.

Last year, Nature did some soul-searching when they got to November and had published four retractions. This year, they published just one.

Rounding out the “glamour journals,” Cell had just one, compared to four last year.

Personal best?

Of course, the person with the most retractions was Joachim Boldt, with 89. Naoki Mori was a distant second, with 32, although a few of those ran last year. Claudio Airoldi’s group retracted 11. And most of the journals listed above were touched by other big names in Retractionville, including Bulfone-Paus, who has now retracted 13, and Anil Potti, who has now retracted 7.

Jatinder Ahluwalia was only forced to retract one paper this year, after retracting one last year. But the revelations that followed cost him a job at the University of East London, and may cause Imperial to strip him of his PhD. His case is a good reminder of why it’s a good idea to poke at what lies beneath retractions.

Here were our top five posts by traffic:

The retraction of an editorial about why semen is a good Valentine’s Day gift, by eminent surgeon Lazar Greenfield

The retraction of a bizarre paper claiming that science and spirituality both came from space

Our coverage of the Claudio Airoldi case

Our now-infamous “none of your damn business” post, covered by Ben Goldacre

Our scoop on two retractions by Zhiguo Wang, who later resigned from the Montreal Heart Institute

Looking forward to 2012

Our wish list is much the same as it was for 2011, particularly better explanations of why particular papers are being retracted, and better publicity for retractions. We’ll add one item to that list: Journals, please stop letting researchers make claims in retraction notices and corrections, unless you peer-review them. Why should we trust the word of researchers who’ve demonstrated they make errors, intentional or not?

And we’ll be keeping an eye on what may be an emerging trend: The mega-correction. We’ve seen errata notices that correct so many different errors, it’s hard to believe the paper shouldn’t have been retracted. It’s unclear what this means yet, but watch this space for coverage of more examples.

We also may be coming to your town. See our list of upcoming appearances, which will be regularly updated. Get in touch if you’d like to host us; we love engaging with readers in person. And don’t forget the Retraction Watch Store.

Happy New Year.

10 Academic Frauds Who Had Everyone Fooled

2011-12-06T11:34:00.001+02:00

Admit it. We’ve all had that moment, deep into a school research project, where the realization hits that the neat hypothesis we had when we started working is not going to be borne out by the data. At that point, we are faced with two options: a) start over, instantly making all those hours already spent a complete waste of time; or, b) fudge the data and transform that stinker into a sexy little piece of academia. For a student, the consequences of such fakery could be as severe as expulsion from school. But for professional academics, the stakes are much higher. Millions of dollars and professional and personal reputations hang in the balance.

Here are ten of the worst frauds, fakers, and phonies ever to pull the wool over the bespectacled eyes of the academic world: >>>

Fraud in the ivory tower (and a big one too)

2011-12-05T11:01:00.005+02:00

Freek Vermeulen

The fraud of Diederik Stapel – professor of social psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands – was enormous. His list of publications was truly impressive, both in terms of the content of the articles as well as its sheer number and the prestige of the journals in which it was published: dozens of articles in all the top psychology journals in academia with a number of them in famous general science outlets such as Science. His seemingly careful research was very thorough in terms of its research design, and was thought to reveal many intriguing insights about fundamental human nature. The problem was, he had made it all up…

For years – so we know now – Diederik Stapel made up all his data. He would carefully reiterature, design all the studies (with his various co-authors), set up the experiments, print out all the questionnaires, and then, instead of actually doing the experiments and distributing the questionnaires, made it all up. Just like that.

He finally got caught because, eventually, he did not even bother anymore to really make up newly faked data. He used the same (fake) numbers for different experiments, gave those to his various PhD students to analyze, who then in disbelief slaving away in their adjacent cubicles discovered that their very different experiments led to exactly the same statistical values (a near impossibility). When they compared their databases, there was substantial overlap. There was no denying it any longer; Diederik Stapel, was making it up; he was immediately fired by the university, admitted to his lengthy fraud, and handed back his PhD degree.

In an open letter, sent to Dutch newspapers to try to explain his actions, he cited the huge pressures to come up with interesting findings that he had been under, in the publish or perish culture that exist in the academic world, which he had been unable to resist, and which led him to his extreme actions.

There are various things I find truly remarkable and puzzling about the case of Diederik Stapel.

The first one is the sheer scale and (eventually) outright clumsiness of his fraud. It also makes me realize that there must be dozens, maybe hundreds of others just like him. They just do it a little bit less, less extreme, and are probably a bit more sophisticated about it, but they’re subject to the exact same pressures and temptations as Diederik Stapel. Surely others give in to them as well. He got caught because he was flying so high, he did it so much, and so clumsily. But I am guessing that for every fraud that gets caught, due to hubris, there are at least ten other ones that don’t.
The second one is that he did it at all. Of course because it is fraud, unethical, and unacceptable, but also because it sort of seems he did not really need it. You have to realize that “getting the data” is just a very small proportion of all the skills and capabilities one needs to get published. You have to really know and understand the literature; you have to be able to carefully design an experiment, ruling out any potential statistical biases, alternative explanations, and other pitfalls; you have to be able to write it up so that it catches people’s interest and imagination; and you have to be able to see the article through the various reviewers and steps in the publication process that every prestigious academic journal operates. Those are substantial and difficult skills; all of which Diederik Stapel possessed. All he did is make up the data; something which is just a small proportion of the total set of skills required, and something that he could have easily outsourced to one of his many PhD students. Sure, you then would not have had the guarantee that the experiment would come out the way you wanted them, but who knows, they could.
That’s what I find puzzling as well; that at no point he seems to have become curious whether his experiments might actually work without him making it all up. They were interesting experiments; wouldn’t you at some point be tempted to see whether they might work…?
Truly amazing I also find the fact that he never stopped. It seems he has much in common with Bernard Madoff and his Ponzi Scheme, or the notorious traders in investments banks such as 827 million Nick Leeson, who brought down Barings Bank with his massive fraudulent trades, Societe Generale’s 4.9 billion Jerome Kerviel, and UBS’s 2.3 billion Kweku Adoboli. The difference: Stapel could have stopped. For people like Madoff or the rogue traders, there was no way back; once they had started the fraud there was no stopping it. But Stapel could have stopped at any point. Surely at some point he must have at least considered this? I guess he was addicted; addicted to the status and aura of continued success.
Finally, what I find truly amazing is that he was teaching the Ethics course at Tilburg University. You just don’t make that one up; that’s Dutch irony at its best.

Journal Editors' Reactions to Word of Plagiarism? Largely Silence - THE CHRONICLE of HIGHER EDUCATION

2011-11-20T13:42:00.002+02:00

Tom Bartlett

Lior Shamir was surprised to learn that one of his papers had been plagiarized. He was even more surprised to learn that it had been plagiarized, by his count, 21 times.

But what really astonished him is that no one seemed to care.

In July, Mr. Shamir, an assistant professor of computer science at Lawrence Technological University, near Detroit, received an anonymous e-mail signed "Prof. Against Plagiarism." That's how he found out that multiple paragraphs from a paper he had presented at a 2006 conference, titled "Human Perception-Based Color Segmentation Using Fuzzy Logic," also appeared in a 2010 paper by two professors in Iran. There was no question of coincidence—the wording was identical—and his paper wasn't even cited.

Curious, he started to poke around some more. One of the Iranian professors, Ali Moghani, a professor at the Institute for Color Science and Technology, in Tehran, appeared to have copied parts of the paper in eight different publications. (Mr. Moghani did not respond to a request for comment.) But he wasn't the only one. The more Mr. Shamir looked, the more he found. Those 21 papers had 26 authors, all of whom had published Mr. Shamir's work under their names, without credit.

It's not as if the paper was a central part of his academic work. In fact, he had forgotten about it until he got the anonymous e-mail.

Now, though, he was intrigued, and more than a little annoyed. So he started contacting journals, indexing services, conference organizers. He sent, by his estimate, about 30 e-mails. He expected that the papers, once it was shown that they had been plagiarized, would be retracted. Maybe he would get an explanation, or an apology, or a response of some kind.

In fact, he received only a couple of replies.

Among those he did receive was a reply from Mohammad Reza Darafsheh, the other Iranian academic. Mr. Darafsheh, a professor of mathematics at the University of Tehran, wrote that "[a]bout the overlap of some sentences in chapter 4 of our paper with yours we feel sorry." But he added that it was "only about one page." The email ended with an offer to collaborate with Mr. Shamir in the future.

When contacted by The Chronicle, Mr. Darafsheh wrote in an e-mail that only one paragraph was identical to the original, and that it had "no scientific value." After it was pointed out to Mr. Darafsheh that, in truth, about 400 words of the eight-page paper appeared to have been copied directly from Mr. Shamir's paper, he insisted that there had been no copying, and that it was merely a "co-accident."

Mr. Darafsheh and Mr. Moghani's paper was published in the Italian Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics. The Chronicle contacted the editor, Piergiulio Corsini, who in turn asked Violeta Leoreanu Fotea, a professor of mathematics at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, in Romania, to investigate. After reviewing both papers, she wrote that she could "not say that Darafsheh and Moghani have plagiarized the work of Shamir."

After The Chronicle e-mailed her multiple examples of just such copying from the paper, Ms. Leoreanu Fotea acknowledged that it was "a lot of identical text," and said Mr. Corsini would decide how to handle the matter. But he wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle that he was not sure what decision he was supposed to make. "The paper has been already published, and I cannot cancel it," he wrote. "I'm sorry for what happened."

Later, Ms. Leoreanu Fotea wrote to say that "two lines on this unpleasant episode of plagiarism" would appear in a future edition of the journal.

'Deny the Undeniable'

In 2009, another paper that borrowed heavily from Mr. Shamir's without credit was published in the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Emerging Trends in Engineering & Technology. One of the co-authors was Preeti Bajaj, president of the G.H. Raisoni College of Engineering, in India, who was also chair of the conference where the plagiarized paper was presented.

That plagiarism was first reported this past September by the journal Nature India, in which Ms. Bajaj acknowledged that portions were copied but blamed a graduate assistant who was a coauthor of the paper. She told Nature India that the assistant had been fired. What she did not mention was that the paper was published again this year in the Journal of Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing. In an e-mail to The Chronicle, she wrote in uncertain English that as a co-author, "I'm guilty but I didn't knew my student will do so." In a follow-up message, she asserted that the "research truth can be known to only those who understands and work on the technology." Ms. Bajaj did not respond to a request for further explanation.

"Surreal" was how Mr. Shamir characterized Ms. Bajaj's defense. Indeed, the response in general has bewildered him. He says he's been greeted either by silence or by attempts to "ridiculously deny the undeniable."

That reaction is echoed by Gerald Koocher, editor of the journal Ethics & Behavior and co-author of Responding to Research Wrongdoing: A User-Friendly Guide. He found Mr. Darafsheh's argument that only one page had been copied laughable. As for Ms. Bajaj's insisting that she didn't know what her graduate assistant had done, Mr. Koocher was unpersuaded: "What does it say about your scholarly integrity that you don't vet what your students write?"

Regarding the behavior of journal editors, he wonders whether there is a reluctance to investigate because doing so might reflect poorly on them. "If you admit that your journal published plagiarized material, you might feel that you have not adequately protected the journal," he says. Of course, Mr. Koocher says, that's no excuse.

At least one investigation continues. The American Institute of Physics, which published a paper co-written by Mr. Moghani in its conference proceedings, says it's looking into allegations of plagiarism. (In this case, Mr. Moghani's abstract is nearly identical to Mr. Shamir's.)

The institute did not respond to two e-mails Mr. Shamir wrote, but it did respond to an inquiry from The Chronicle. Mark Cassar, publisher of journals and technical publications at the institute, wrote that it "regrets not responding to Prof. Shamir in a timely fashion."

Mr. Shamir sees a larger danger here: "Science is based on sharing, and the sharing of results and ideas is protected by strict and welldefined ethics guidelines. If editors allow violating these guidelines, this whole sensitive structure might collapse."

So why did this one rather minor publication attract so many plagiarists? Mr. Shamir finds that yet another mystery. "It wasn't even such a good paper," he says.

Breaking news: Prolific Dutch heart researcher fired over misconduct concerns - Retraction Watch

2011-11-17T09:26:00.005+02:00

Don Poldermans, a leading heart specialist, has been fired over concerns that he committed research misconduct. According to a report on the website DutchNews.nl:

"Erasmus University in Rotterdam has sacked a professor in cardio-vascular medicine for damaging the institution’s academic integrity and for ‘scientific misconduct’, the NRC reports on Thursday.
The professor is accused of faking academic data and compromising patient trust, the paper says. In particular, he failed to obtain patient consent for carrying out research and recorded results ‘which cannot be resolved to patient information,’ the university said.
Don Poldermans has spent years researching the risk of complications during cardio-vascular surgery and has some 500 publications to his name.
A spokesman for Poldermans told the paper he admitted not keeping to research protocols but denied faking data."

One of Poldermans’ most widely known areas of research involved the effects of beta-blockers on surgery patients, for which he conducted some of the foundational trails. A search of Medline revealed at least 75 publications on that subject alone.

So far, we have no indication about which, if any, of Poldermans’ publications will be retracted. Sixteen of his papers have been cited at least 100 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knoweldge, and one, in the European Heart Journal, has been cited more than 700.

Steven Shafer, editor of Anesthesia & Analgesia, which published one of Poldermans’ articles in 2009, as well as an editorial, called the news “mindboggling.”

"We’ll write a note to the university and ask them, is this paper fraudulent or not. When this happens you have to consider every paper suspect."

The case comes just weeks after officials at Tilburg University in the Netherlands fired Diederik Stapel, a noted social psychologist, for fabricating data in at least 30 papers.

Update 1:30 pm Eastern, 11/17/11: According to a statement from Poldermans’ institution, Erasmus MC, the researcher was fired earlier this week after questions surfaced about a study involving outcomes of surgery patients.

"Erasmus MC dismissed Prof. D. Poldermans on 16 November because of violation of academic integrity. Research carried out under his leadership was not always performed in accordance with current scientific standards.
An inquiry committee on Academic Integrity concluded that the professor was careless in collecting the data for his research. In one study it was found that he used patient data without written permission, used fictitious data and that two reports were submitted to conferences which included knowingly unreliable data.
Regret
The professor agrees with the committee’s conclusions and expressed his regret for his actions. Poldermans feels that as experienced researcher he should have been more accurate but states that his actions were unintentional.
Action
The study that gave rise to the inquiry committee having to take action was the health of patients who had to undergo surgery. The aim of the study was to identify which factors can contribute to being able to better estimate the risks of complications. There were no medical implications for the patients who took part in the studies.
Apologize
Erasmus MC will, however, endeavor to inform the patients concerned personally and apologize to them."

Here’s a link to a press release, in Dutch, from Erasmus MC about the matter.

All this suggests that the vast bulk of Poldermans’ 500-odd publications won’t require retraction. That should be a relief to editors and researchers — and patients — alike, given his outsized influence on the field. However, it’s still too soon to tell, and we’ll be watching this case closely as it unfolds.

Hat tip for press release: Larry Husten

Real scientists never report fraud

2011-11-03T18:34:00.002+02:00

Daniel Lemire

Diederik Stapel has been a psychology professor at major universities for the last ten years. He published well over 100 research papers in prestigious journals such as Science. Some of his research papers have been highly cited. He trained nearly 20 Ph.D. students.

It was recently fired when it was finally determined that he was making up all of his research data, including the data that he was providing to students. He was making up research assistants and experiments. He wasn’t even particularly careful as the data had significant statistical anomalies (such as identical averages for different data sets).

Managers, colleagues, journals, collaborators and competitors failed to openly report him. It took outsiders (students) to report him. The best journals, and correspondingly, the best scientists were repeatedly fooled by Stapel. Judging by his numerous citations, people built on his work…

People who want to believe that “peer reviewed work” means “correct work” will object that this is just one case. But what about the recently dismissed Harvard professor Marc Hauser? We find exactly the same story. Marc Hauser published over 200 papers in the best journals, making up data as he went. Again colleagues, journals and collaborators failed to openly challenge him: it took naive students, that is, outsiders, to report the fraud.

The real scientists, the peers of the researchers, don’t report fraud. Questioning someone’s results is a dangerous adventure.

Some point out to me that this does not apply to fields such as Computer Science. Really? Have you ever tried to reproduce the experimental results from popular papers? Quite often, it is very difficult or even impossible. It does not help that Computer Science researchers almost never post their software or data. (Almost all my software is already online.)

But what is critical is that traditional peer review does not protect against fraud. It is merely a check that the work appears superficially correct and interesting. A reviewer who would go out of his way to check whether a paper reports truthful results should not expect accolades. That is not how the game is played.

Further reading: How reliable is science?

The Fraud Who Fooled (Almost) Everyone - THE CHRONICLE of HIGHER EDUCATION

2011-11-03T09:53:00.003+02:00

Tom Bartlett

It’s now known that Diederik Stapel, the Dutch social psychologist who was suspended by Tilburg University in September, faked dozens of studies and managed not to get caught for years despite his outrageous fabrications. But how, exactly, did he do it?

That question won’t be fully answered for a while—the investigation into the vast fraud is continuing. But a just-released English version of Tilburg’s interim report on Stapel’s deception begins to fill in some of the details of how he manipulated those who worked with him.

This was, according to the report, his modus operandi:

Pretending to help fellow researchers

Stapel would chat with colleagues about what they were working on. Nothing unusual there. But then, as luck would have it, he would reveal that he had an old data set that he’d never gotten around to using that “matched the colleague’s needs perfectly.” He turned that data set over, the paper was published, and Stapel was listed as a co-author. None of those colleagues, according to the report, knew that the data were made up.

Making it seem plausible

Stapel was savvy enough to create convincing cover stories. The fictitious research he was doing would take “many weeks, or even months” to finish. When asked why other researchers couldn’t contact the high schools where he was conducting some of his research, Stapel explained that it was to “prevent the schools being overrun with similar requests, which would hamper [his] access to them.”

Mixing fact and fiction

While apparently Stapel could be “vague” at times about how his research was conducted, he threw in just enough actual details to create some verisimilitude. For instance, details about the curriculum and location of a particular high school were true, though the studies were never conducted and the research assistants who helped him were imaginary.

Intimidation

The report describes Stapel as charismatic and well respected. His research papers—like the one about how meat-eaters are supposedly selfish—made a splash with the news media. His success seemed to insulate him from criticism. When a young researcher asked for access to raw data, Stapel accused the researcher of “calling his capacities and experience as a renowned professor into question.” He also made those around him feel lucky to be working with him and bragged about his data. “Be aware that you have gold in your hands,” he told one researcher.

Controlling the data

This is probably the most important part of Stapel’s deception. He and he alone was in charge of his data. Others were not allowed access to it. He handled the processing and coding of the data. Graduate students who worked with him were told that “they could make better use of their time for the real scientific work (analyzing and writing).” Likewise, when working with more-senior researchers, Stapel “took personal charge of the ‘data collection’ and provided the outcomes, but not the raw data.” According to the report, “probing questions were usually cut short with an appeal to the trust that Mr. Stapel was entitled to.”

But he didn’t successfully bluff everybody. Three young researchers blew the whistle on Stapel in August, bringing their concerns to the head of the department. In addition, three other young researchers “had previously raised the alarm.” Two professors had suspicions but apparently didn’t come forward. From the report: “The committee concludes that the six young whistle-blowers showed more courage, vigilance, and inquisitiveness than incumbent full professors. ”

While it is becoming clearer how Stapel committed his fraud, the larger question is why. In separate statements, he explained that “I was not able to withstand the pressure to score points, to publish, to always have to be better,” and that he felt “a sense of dismay and shame” but that he was “sincerely committed to the field of social psychology, young researchers, and other colleagues.”

Apparently, he saw no contradiction between that commitment and systematically manufacturing results for years, harming his graduate students and co-authors along the way, and staring down anyone who would dare question him.

Diederik Stapel: The Lying Dutchman - The Washington Post

2011-11-01T10:12:00.003+02:00

By Joel Achenbach

Big science news today out of the Netherlands: A top social scientist, Diederik Stapel, of Tilburg University, has been suspended after an investigation showed that he’s been fabricating his data for years. This may seem far away and esoteric in the extreme, but there’s collateral damage here in DC, home base of the AAAS journal Science, which published one of Diederik Stapel’s papers in April.

That paper, “Coping With Chaos: How Disordered Contexts Promote Stereotypying and Discrimination,” claimed that people were more likely to be prejudicial toward others when in the presence of litter, a broken sidewalk, an abandoned bicycle, etc.

The problem is, there may not have been any experiment upon which this conclusion was based. Stapel apparently invented his raw data and then handed it to his graduate students to intepret. Read the story at Science Insider:

“The panel reported that he would discuss in detail experimental designs, including drafting questionnaires, and would then claim to conduct the experiments at high schools and universities with which he had special arrangements. The experiments, however, never took place, the universities concluded. Stapel made up the data sets, which he then gave the student or collaborator for analysis, investigators allege. In other instances, the report says, he told colleagues that he had an old data set lying around that he hadn’t yet had a chance to analyze. When Stapel did conduct actual experiments, the committee found evidence that he manipulated the results.

“Many of Stapel’s students graduated without having ever run an experiment, the report says. Stapel told them that their time was better spent analyzing data and writing. The commission writes that Stapel was ’lord of the data’ in his collaborations. It says colleagues or students who asked to see raw data were given excuses or even threatened and insulted.”

It’s not known yet if the Science paper in April was one of the ones with fabricated data, but Science spokeswoman Kathy Wren said this afternoon, “It seems highly likely that this Science paper is involved.” She said the Dutch investigators alerted the journal in September that the April paper might be tainted.

The journal’s editor-in-chief, Bruce Alberts, issued a brief statement today, called an “Editorial Expression of Concern,” in which he noted the findings released Monday by the Dutch investigators. He said the report “indicates that the extent of the fraud by Stapel is substantial.”

His students were victims, too — and ultimately realized that they were being taken for a ride. According to Science Insider, 14 of 21 of the theses published by Stapel’s students were affected by the tainted data.

Should the journal Science have known that this was a bogus paper? There’s a peer review process, but it’s one that isn’t designed to detect outright, bald-faced fraud.

Wren said today, “Science is not an investigative body, and so if a scientist is intentionally trying to deceive, the peer review system is not really set up to investigate that sort of thing.”

[Good report here by Ewen Callaway of Nature, republished by Scientific American’s website. Describes Stapel as a wunderkind. The investigative report has a statement from Stapel: “I have made mistakes, but I was and am honestly concerned with the field of social psychology. I therefore regret the pain that I have caused others.”]

Summation Letter on Plagiarism Case: Psychopathy requires legal entitlement, not logic or shame

2011-10-21T11:51:00.001+03:00

Zahir Ebrahim

This is to summarize the situation since my discovery of the masterpiece of plagiarism in a tortuous system of willfully aiding and abetting the theft of intellectual property amidst lip-service to high piety, on Sept. 28, 2011.

Over a hundred senior academics and senior civil servants of Pakistan occupying the position of Vice Chancellor/Rector were informed of this system-wide collusion on October 07, 2011 in a detailed Letter to Editor: >>>

Foreign student rule-breaking: culture clash or survival skills? -TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION

2011-10-06T06:38:00.002+03:00

Jon Marcus

North American administrators call high rates of plagiarism 'tip of the iceberg'. Jon Marcus reports

Gary Pavela remembers being surprised by the defiant reaction of a visiting student from China who he confronted over a clear-cut incident of plagiarism.

"But in my culture, we view it as honouring someone to use their words," the student told Mr Pavela, who is the director of academic integrity at Syracuse University in the US.

He thought about that for a moment before responding.

No, Mr Pavela told the student, there really was no cultural difference in that regard.

"All we're asking is that you honour them a little bit more by giving them the credit," he said.

Such conversations are becoming increasingly commonplace for administrators in the US and Canada, as North American universities aggressively recruit international students - and find that a disproportionate number of them break the academic rules.

In one study, the University of Windsor in the Canadian province of Ontario tracked how many foreign students were being cited for academic dishonesty compared with their Canadian classmates. It found that one in 53 international students had been charged versus one in 1,122 Canadians.

Even that, said Danielle Istl, Windsor's academic integrity officer, "is only the tip of the iceberg. We don't know how much goes on behind the scenes."

Most of the international students who wound up in the disciplinary process were accused of plagiarism, she added.

"To me, that isn't that surprising because you have students whose first language isn't English and they may struggle writing papers in English."

However, other studies have found that the most common offence perpetrated by foreign students is cheating in examinations.

But many of the misdemeanours are not deliberate, said Florida Doci, a student from Albania and an officer of Windsor's International Student Society.

"Most of the international students have not had to write a paper and follow the rules of referencing (before)," she said. "They happen to cheat or make mistakes like this because they don't know they're doing it. They're used to writing down whatever they read.

"I see it more as a problem that affects international students because of where they come from, rather than something they're doing intentionally."

'Survival mechanism'

While administrators are hesitant to generalise further about what may be driving students from abroad to cheat, they acknowledge that cultural differences play a major role - although not the kind claimed by Mr Pavela's unrepentant student.

Twenty per cent of international students in the US come from China (up 30 per cent on last year alone) and 15 per cent are from India, the largest groups of foreign students in the country (the numbers are similar in Canada). Experienced administrators suggest that this has a lot to do with the rise in cheating.

In some countries - China and India included - "the climate for academic integrity is not strong", said Mr Pavela, a lawyer by training who has served as a consultant to the US State Department.

"It is not simply an issue of the deficiencies of students, but includes faculty who cut corners or who do not share any more of a commitment to academic integrity than students do," he added.

Cheating for such students, he said, "is a survival mechanism. They are part of cultures where you have to do what you have to do."

Compounding this is the pressure heaped on Chinese and Indian students by relatives and sponsors.

"Those pressures include the potential embarrassment of having to go home (having not) succeeded here," said Don McCabe, professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School and founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity.

But Professor McCabe added that US and Canadian universities had to take their share of the blame, too.

"It's the fault of the institutions in the sense that they aggressively recruit these students and don't adequately orient them in the different traditions of academic integrity," he argued.

At Windsor, international undergraduates do receive orientation, including a separate programme for engineering and management students, and yet another focused on academic integrity and managing exams tailored to foreign graduate teaching assistants.

International students in master's programmes for management and engineering are also required to sign "academic honesty agreements".

There are plans for even more comprehensive measures to be introduced next year.

Mr Pavela said this was welcome, but cautioned that highlighting concerns about international students' honesty could cause further problems.

"The debate here includes whether there is a 'spotlighting effect' going on, that we are more likely to scrutinise people from a different culture," he said.

Retracted Science and the Retraction Index

2011-10-05T06:04:00.000+03:00

Ferric C. Fang, Editor in Chief

Arturo Casadevall, Editor in Chief

R. P. Morrison, Editor

Infection and Immunity

Articles may be retracted when their findings are no longer considered trustworthy due to scientific misconduct or error, they plagiarize previously published work, or they are found to violate ethical guidelines. Using a novel measure that we call the “retraction index,” we found that the frequency of retraction varies among journals and shows a strong correlation with the journal impact factor. Although retractions are relatively rare, the retraction process is essential for correcting the literature and maintaining trust in the scientific process.>>>

Science publishing: The trouble with retractions - NATURE

2011-10-05T06:02:00.003+03:00

A surge in withdrawn papers is highlighting weaknesses in the system for handling them.

Richard Van Noorden

This week, some 27,000 freshly published research articles will pour into the Web of Science, Thomson Reuters' vast online database of scientific publications. Almost all of these papers will stay there forever, a fixed contribution to the research literature. But 200 or so will eventually be flagged with a note of alteration such as a correction. And a handful — maybe five or six — will one day receive science's ultimate post-publication punishment: retraction, the official declaration that a paper is so flawed that it must be withdrawn from the literature.

It is reassuring that retractions are so rare, for behind at least half of them lies some shocking tale of scientific misconduct — plagiarism, altered images or faked data — and the other half are admissions of embarrassing mistakes. But retraction notices are increasing rapidly. In the early 2000s, only about 30 retraction notices appeared annually. This year, the Web of Science is on track to index more than 400 (see 'Rise of the retractions') — even though the total number of papers published has risen by only 44% over the past decade.

Perhaps surprisingly, scientists and editors broadly welcome the trend. "I don't think there's any doubt that we're detecting more fraud, and that systems are more responsive to misconduct. It's become more acceptable for journals to step in," says Nicholas Steneck, a research ethicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. But as retractions become more commonplace, stresses that have always existed in the system are starting to show more vividly.

When the UK-based Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) surveyed editors' attitudes to retraction two years ago, it found huge inconsistencies in policies and practices between journals, says Elizabeth Wager, a medical writer in Princes Risborough, UK, who is chair of COPE. That survey led to retraction guidelines that COPE published in 2009. But it's still the case, says Wager, that "editors often have to be pushed to retract".

Other frustrations include opaque retraction notices that don't explain why a paper has been withdrawn, a tendency for authors to keep citing retracted papers long after they've been red-flagged (see 'Withdrawn papers live on') and the fact that many scientists hear 'retraction' and immediately think 'misconduct' — a stigma that may keep researchers from coming forward to admit honest errors.

Perfection may be too much to expect from any system that has to deal with human error in all its messiness. As one journal editor told Wager, each retraction is "painfully unique".

But as more retractions hit the headlines, some researchers are calling for ways to improve their handling. Suggested reforms include better systems for linking papers to their retraction notices or revisions, more responsibility on the part of journal editors and, most of all, greater transparency and clarity about mistakes in research.

The reasons behind the rise in retractions are still unclear. "I don't think that there is suddenly a boom in the production of fraudulent or erroneous work," says John Ioannidis, a professor of health policy at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, who has spent much of his career tracking how medical science produces flawed results.

In surveys, around 1–2% of scientists admit to having fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once (D. Fanelli PLoS ONE 4, e5738; 2009). But over the past decade, retraction notices for published papers have increased from 0.001% of the total to only about 0.02%. And, Ioannidis says, that subset of papers is "the tip of the iceberg" — too small and fragmentary for any useful conclusions to be drawn about the overall rates of sloppiness or misconduct.

Instead, it is more probable that the growth in retractions has come from an increased awareness of research misconduct, says Steneck. That's thanks in part to the setting up of regulatory bodies such as the US Office of Research Integrity in the Department of Health and Human Services. These ensure greater accountability for the research institutions, which, along with researchers, are responsible for detecting mistakes.

The growth also owes a lot to the emergence of software for easily detecting plagiarism and image manipulation, combined with the greater number of readers that the Internet brings to research papers. In the future, wider use of such software could cause the rate of retraction notices to dip as fast as it spiked, simply because more of the problematic papers will be screened out before they reach publication. On the other hand, editors' newfound comfort with talking about retraction may lead to notices coming at an even greater rate.

"Norms are changing all the time," says Steven Shafer, editor-in-chief of the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia, who has participated in two major misconduct investigations — one of which involved 11 journals and led to the retraction of some 90 papers.

It's none of your damn business!

But willingness to talk about retractions is hardly universal. "There are a lot of publishers and a lot of journal editors who really don't want people to know about what's going on at their publications," says New York City-based writer Ivan Oransky, executive editor at Reuters Health. In August 2010, Oransky co-founded the blog Retraction Watch with Adam Marcus, managing editor at Anesthesiology News. Since its launch, Oransky says, the site has logged 1.1 million page views and has covered more than 200 retractions.

In one memorable post, the reporters describe ringing up one editor, L. Henry Edmunds at the Annals of Thoracic Surgery, to ask about a paper withdrawn from his journal (see go.nature.com/ubv261). "It's none of your damn business!" he told them. Edmunds did not respond to Nature 's request to talk for this article.

The posts on Retraction Watch show how wildly inconsistent retractions practices are from one journal to the next. Notices range from informative and transparent to deeply obscure. A typically unhelpful example of the genre would be: "This article has been withdrawn at the request of the authors in order to eliminate incorrect information." Oransky argues that such obscurity leads readers to assume misconduct, as scientists making an honest retraction would, presumably, try to explain what was at fault.

To Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, there are two obvious reasons for obscure retraction notices: "fear and work."

The fear factor, says Wager, is because publishers are very frightened of being sued. "They are incredibly twitchy about publishing anything that could be defamatory," she says.

'Work' refers to the phenomenal effort required to sort through authorship disputes, concerns about human or animal subjects, accusations of data fabrication and all the other ways a paper can go wrong. "It takes dozens or hundreds of hours of work to get to the bottom of what's going on and really understand it," says Shafer. Because most journal editors are scientists or physicians working on a voluntary basis, he says, that effort comes out of their research and clinical time.

But the effort has to be made, says Steneck. "If you don't have enough time to do a reasonable job of ensuring the integrity of your journal, do you deserve to be in business as a journal publisher?" he asks. Oransky and Marcus have taken a similar stance. This summer, for example, Retraction Watch criticized the Journal of Neuroscience for a pair of identical retraction notices it published on 8 June: "At the request of the authors, the following manuscript has been retracted."

But the journal's editor-in-chief, neuroscientist John Maunsell of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, argues that such obscurity is often the most responsible course to take. "My feeling is that there are far fewer retractions than there should be," says Maunsell, who adds that he has conducted 79 ethics investigations in more than 3 years at the journal — 1 every 2–3 weeks. But "authors are reluctant to retract papers", he says, "and anything we put up in the way of a barrier or disincentive is a bad thing. If authors are happier posting retractions without extra information, I'd rather see that retraction go through than provide any discouragement."

At the heart of these arguments, says Steneck, lie shifting norms of how responsible journal editors should be for the integrity of the research process. In the past, he says, "they felt that institutions and scientists ought to do it". More and more journal editors today are starting to embrace the gatekeeper role. But even now, Shafer points out, they have only limited authority to challenge institutions that are refusing to cooperate. "I have had institutions, where I felt there was very clear misconduct, come back and tell me there was none," Shafer says. "And I have had a US institution tell me that they would look into allegations of misconduct only if I agreed to keep the results confidential."

The blame game

Discussions on Retraction Watch make it clear that many scientists would like to separate two aspects of retraction that seem to have become tangled together: cleaning up the literature, and signalling misconduct. After all, many retractions are straightforward and honourable. In July, for example, Derek Stein, a physicist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, retracted a paper in Physical Review Letters on DNA in nanofluidic channels when he found that a key part of the analysis had been performed incorrectly. His thoroughness and speed — the retraction came just four months after publication — were singled out for praise on Retraction Watch.

But because almost all of the retractions that hit the headlines are dramatic examples of misconduct, many researchers assume that any retraction indicates that something shady has occurred. And that stigma may dissuade honest scientists from doing the right thing. One American researcher who talked to Nature about his own early-career retraction said he hoped that his decision would be seen as a badge of honour. But, even years later and with his career established, he still did not want Nature to use his name or give any details of the case.

There is no general agreement about how to reduce this stigma. Rennie suggests reserving the retraction mechanism exclusively for misconduct, but that would require the creation of a new term for withdrawals owing to honest mistakes. At the other extreme, Thomas DeCoursey, a biologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, argues for retraction of any paper that publishes results that are not reproducible. "It does not matter whether the error was due to outright fraud, honest mistakes or reasons that simply cannot be determined," he says.

A better vocabulary for talking about retractions is needed, says Steneck — one acknowledging that retractions are just as often due to mistakes as to misconduct. Also useful would be a database for classifying retractions. "The risk for the research community is that if it doesn't take these problems more seriously, then the public — journalists, outsiders — will come in and start to poke at them," he points out.

The only near-term solution comes back to transparency. "If journals told readers why a paper was retracted, it wouldn't matter if one journal retracted papers for misconduct while another retracted for almost anything," says Zen Faulkes, a biologist at the University of Texas–Pan American in Edinburg, Texas.

Oransky agrees. "I think that what we're advocating is part of a much larger phenomenon in public life and on the Web right now," he says. "What scientists should be doing is saying, 'In the course of what we do are errors, and among us are also people that commit misconduct or fraud. Look how small that number is! And here's what we're doing to root that out.'"

Richard Van Noorden is an assistant news editor for Nature in London. For more analysis of retraction statistics, click here.

Paper mill websites increase in Turkey

2011-09-13T05:41:00.005+03:00

Çağla Pınar Tunçel - Hürriyet Daily News

Academics have decried the rise in the number of Turkish “paper mill” websites offering to write theses for students, yet company officials have defended their business, saying they are legal even as scholars warn of the ramifications.

“Our company, which is run by academics, provides translation service and ensures that the text conforms with linguistic terminology while writing the thesis,” one company official told the Hürriyet Daily News on condition of anonymity.

The official said the business was legal because his company only provided thesis “consultancy” and paid tax, but added that many other disrespectful companies were becoming involved in plagiarism as they wrote the theses.

But Bertil Emrah Odar, the dean of Koç University’s Law Department, told the Daily News that the businesses, which offer unique and personalized content, were entirely illegal and could result in the student who bought the paper becoming the subject of an investigation by either the Higher Education Board, or YÖK, or university administration.

“An academic may lose his title in the event of plagiarism,” she said. “If the person is a member of an association, for instance a doctors’ or lawyers’ association, then the group may decide to ban the person from the occupation forever.”

According to Ali Çarkoğlu, an academic at Koç University, said that even if an investigation did not result in any punishment, a scholar thought to have bought an article would likely be ostracized by the academic community.

The cost of purchasing such material ranges between 5,000 and 20,000 Turkish Liras, depending on certain criteria, such as whether the work is a Master’s or a Ph.D. theses, whether there were any surveys conducted or whether there are any foreign sources, Doğan news agency, or DHA, reported Monday.

Requests to write theses are usually rejected if there is less than eight weeks left to finish the work, while the clients are also required to transmit all interviews with thesis advisors to the consultancy businesses, according to reports.

Most writers refuse to do any work for less than 1,000 liras, or pen any theses for less than 3,000 liras. Reports indicate that many customers are attendees of private universities, while students who are employed in a job are also more likely to use such services.

Following negotiations, some 20 percent of the price is paid by the clients at the beginning of the work, while another 20 percent is paid after the draft theses are finished. The rest of the amount is paid after the work is finally completed, according to reports.

Many of the enterprises work with around 300 to 400 expert personnel who specialize in about 200 different topics, reports said.

Publish-or-perish: Peer review and the corruption of science - The Guardian

2011-09-05T06:44:00.007+03:00

David Colquhoun

Pressure on scientists to publish has led to a situation where any paper, however bad, can now be printed in a journal that claims to be peer-reviewed.

Peer review is the process that decides whether your work gets published in an academic journal. It doesn't work very well any more, mainly as a result of the enormous number of papers that are being published (an estimated 1.3 million papers in 23,750 journals in 2006). There simply aren't enough competent people to do the job. The overwhelming effect of the huge (and unpaid) effort that is put into reviewing papers is to maintain a status hierarchy of journals. Any paper, however bad, can now get published in a journal that claims to be peer-reviewed.

The blame for this sad situation lies with the people who have imposed a publish-or-perish culture, namely research funders and senior people in universities. To have "written" 800 papers is regarded as something to boast about rather than being rather shameful. University PR departments encourage exaggerated claims, and hard-pressed authors go along with them. >>>

Q&A: The Impact of Retractions - TheScientist

2011-08-11T23:18:00.000+03:00

Is the pressure of the publish-or-perish mentality driving more researchers to commit misconduct? By Tia Ghose

After six articles from a single research group—the laboratory of Naoki Mori at the University of the Ryukyus in Japan—were retracted from Infection and Immunity earlier this year, Editor-in-Chief Ferric Fang did some soul searching. He and Arturo Casadevall, editor-in-chief of the American Society for Microbiology journal mBio and Fang’s long-time friend and colleague, decided to explore the issue more deeply in an editorial published this week (August 8) in Infection and Immunity.

Fang, a bacteriologist at the University of Washington, recently talked with The Scientist about the rising number of retractions, why high profile journals may have more retractions, and what pressures lead some scientists to fudge their data.

The Scientist: Tell me a little more about the retractions in the Infection and Immunity articles.

Ferric Fang: [An investigation by the investigator’s institution found that] gel pictures had been cut and pasted, and then misrepresented to be different things. We reviewed all the manuscripts and came to the conclusion that the institution was correct. At this point we notified the investigator of our findings and we invited him to reply and try to explain the findings. Through this discussion, we reached our conclusion that in fact there had been inappropriate manipulation of these figures.

This led us to do some soul searching about why misconduct occurs and whether retractions are really all there is to it—and they’re pretty rare—or whether there’s a lot more misconduct going on, and retractions are the tip of the iceberg. And I’m sorry to say I’ve come more or less to the latter conclusion.

TS: In your editorial, you note that retractions are on the rise. Why is that, and is there any way to reverse the trend?

FF: I think it behooves scientists to take a look at the way we have organized the scientific community and the kinds of pressure we put on scientists. We have a situation now where people’s careers are on the line, it’s very difficult to get funding, and getting funding is dependent on publication. They’re human beings and if we put them under extraordinary pressures, they may in some cases yield to bad behavior.

TS: You also developed the “retraction index,” a measure of a given journal’s retraction rate, which showed the rate of retraction was positively correlated with the impact factor of the journal. Why do you think that is?

FF: The idea to look at the correlation between the number of retractions and journal impact factor was first suggested by my co-author, Arturo Casadevall. One of the reasons we devised this retraction index is the idea that maybe the pressures to try to get papers in prestigious journals was a driving force in encouraging people to engage in misconduct. I’m not excusing the behavior by any means at all. But I know of cases, for example, where scientists have committed misconduct, who if they’re not successful in their research, they’ll lose their job and they might be deported from the country. So these are extraordinary pressures that are being put on people. I don’t think it’s going to bring out the best science—it’s going to discourage a lot of things we want to have in science, like people feeling free to explore and take chances.

TS: Is it possible that there are more people looking at those top-tier journals, so the mistakes are just caught more?

FF: That’s certainly a possibility. Extraordinary claims require a higher bar before the scientific community accepts them, and I think some of this work that’s published in the glamour mag journals—Science, Nature, Cell—are in those journals because they’re sensational: things like the arsenic using bacterium for example, or the novel murine virus that was associated with chronic fatigue syndrome. These claims, because they have such enormous implications and because they’re so sensational, they’re going to be subjected to a very high level of scrutiny. If that claim was made in an obscure journal, it might take a longer time [to] attract attention.

TS: Reviewers are the main route to catch misconduct before publication, but retractions are on the rise. Is there a better system?

FF: I don’t know that there is a better system… We’ve had a number of times where questions have been raised about whether data are fishy or not, and we haven’t been able to conclusively establish that. And you don’t have access to the primary data, right? You don’t have the lab notebook, you’re not there at the bench when the person is doing that experiment.

Reviewers may call into question certain observations, but if you have a single lane in a gel that’s beautifully spliced in but is actually lifted from another paper in another field, from the same lab four years earlier in a completely different journal, it will just take dumb luck for the reviewer to realize that.

TS: What if people just submitted their raw data when they submitted a paper?

FF: I think it would make the job of reviewing incredibly more challenging. But I don’t think even that can completely solve the problem. You don’t have any way of knowing that what is sent to you is really complete or accurate. If somebody is bound and determined to commit misconduct, they’re going to be very difficult to detect.

F. Fang, A. Casadevall, “Retracted science and the retraction index,” Infection and Immunity, doi:10.1128/IAI.05661-11, 2011.

Is it time for a Retraction Index? - Retraction Watch

2011-08-11T17:55:00.001+03:00

We often hear — with data to back the statement — that top-tier journals, ranked by impact factor, retract more papers than lower-tier journals. For example, when Murat Cokol and colleagues compared journals’ retraction numbers in EMBO Reports in 2007, as Nature noted in its coverage of that study (h/t Richard van Noorden):

"Journals with high impact factors retract more papers, and low-impact journals are more likely not to retract them, the study finds. It also suggests that high- and low-impact journals differ little in detecting flawed articles before they are published."

One thing you notice when you look at Cokol et al’s plots is that although their models seem to take retractions “per capita” — in other words per study published – into account, they don’t report those figures.

Enter a paper published this week in Infection and Immunity (IAI) by Ferric Fang and Arturo Casadevall, “Retracted Science and the Retraction Index.” Fang, the editor of IAI, takes scientific integrity and retractions very seriously. He’s made his thinking on these issues clear every time we’ve asked, and was part of the review of the the Naoki Mori case that led to a 10-year ban on Mori publishing in American Society of Microbiology journals (including IAI). >>>

Turkish Education Minister under Plagiarism Charges

2011-07-20T19:22:00.004+03:00

Debora Weber-Wulff

The Nature blog reports that the new Turkish Minister of Education, Ömer Dinçer, lost his title of professor in 2005 on the basis of plagiarism in a textbook published in his name. Turkish Council of Higher Education took back his professorship title, and Dinçer lost his legal appeals case.

But on July 8, 2011, the Turkish Council of Higher Education cleared him, and on July 13 he was appointed Minister of Education. Nature spoke with the council, which confirmed that they had withdrawn the charge of plagiarism, but refused to elaborate.

Since this is a publicly available textbook, I would hope that Turkish academics can quickly set up a wiki and document the extent of the alleged plagiarism, in order to let the public judge for themselves how extensive the copying is.

Contested plagiarism charge on new Turkish government

2011-07-18T06:08:00.006+03:00

Alison Abbott

German politicians found guilty of plagiarism have seen their careers stumble. First came the forced resignation in March of the German defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg - the University of Bayreuth withdrew his PhD thesis after identifying extensive plagiarism. Other German politicians wielding doctor titles were then gleefully been targeted by plagiarism software users. Only last month, Silvana Koch-Mehrin of Germany's Free Democratic Party (FDP) was forced to withdraw from the European Parliament's Committee on Industry, Research and Energy after the University of Heidelberg had revoked her plagiarizing PhD. Her predecessor on the committee, Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, had his own PhD revoked by the University of Bonn last week for plagiarism.

In Turkey, on the other hand, a controversial charge of plagiarism has not stopped Ömer Dinçer from being appointed minister of education in Prime Minister Erdogan’s new government. The new government was approved by parliament on 13 July.

Dinçer got his PhD from İstanbul University School of Business Administration in 1984. He went on to build up a high flying academic career in parallel with a political career, becoming chief undersecretary in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s first government in 2003, and minister of labour in Erdoğan’s second government after 2007 elections.

But he lost his title of professor in 2005 when the Turkish Council of Higher Education YÖK identified extensive plagiarism in his academic book Introduction to Business Administration. Dinçer appealed the charge, but it was upheld in court.

On 8 July newspapers reported that YÖK had quietly cleared him early this year to the dismay of many academics. YÖK confirmed to Nature that it had withdrawn the charge but did not provide reasons.

Dinçer has told newspapers that the charge of plagiarism was part of a smear campaign from a supposed network of people, known as Ergenekon, who favour a military coup.

Doctoral Plagiarism Elsewhere

2011-07-11T06:30:00.004+03:00

Plagiarized doctoral theses are not only to be found in Germany. Janet Stemwedel reports on Adventures in Ethics and Science on the case of chemist Bengü Sezen. She links to Chemical & Engineering News with a report on the disseration and three other papers. She quotes:

The documents—an investigative report from Columbia and HHS’s subsequent oversight findings—show a massive and sustained effort by Sezen over the course of more than a decade to dope experiments, manipulate and falsify NMR and elemental analysis research data, and create fictitious people and organizations to vouch for the reproducibility of her results. ...

A notice in the Nov. 29, 2010, Federal Register states that Sezen falsified, fabricated, and plagiarized research data in three papers and in her doctoral thesis. Some six papers that Sezen had coauthored with Columbia chemistry professor Dalibor Sames have been withdrawn by Sames because Sezen’s results could not be replicated. ...

By the time Sezen received a Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 2005, under the supervision of Sames, her fraudulent activity had reached a crescendo, according to the reports. Specifically, the reports detail how Sezen logged into NMR spectrometry equipment under the name of at least one former Sames group member, then merged NMR data and used correction fluid to create fake spectra showing her desired reaction products.

Correction fluid? I thought that state-of-the-art fakes used Photoshop these days.

Promotion pressure fuels academic plagiarism - The Jacarta Post

2011-07-10T09:15:00.004+03:00

Several modus operandi of plagiarism:

1. Taking a research paper or article from a registered science journal, and copying it so that a lecturer can replace the name of the original author with his or her name. This plagiarized item will then be submitted along with their application for promotion.
2. Deleting a section of an already publicized scientific journal, and replacing it with his own article. The bogus article will then be reprinted in a similar font format and paper size. The lecturer hopes to receive acknowledgement by including his work in the journal.
3. Taking credit for a research paper or final-year assignment completed by students attending the lecturer’s class.
4. Directly copying and pasting a research paper, article, or parts of a paper or article, written by another person, usually taken from Internet-based sources rather than a journal, and passing it off as one’s own work. This is the most common method of plagiarism committed by lecturers.(JP/From various sources)

Amid the country’s messy education system, the number of cases of plagiarism involving university lecturers is unlikely to abate. The Jakarta Post’s Hasyim Widhiarto explores the reasons why some lecturers steal from the works of others and how exactly works are plagiarized.>>>

From and to a very grey area

2011-06-01T14:17:00.005+03:00

EDITORIAL

EMBO reports (2011) 12, 479, Published online: 1 June 2011

Howy Jacobs

The scandal surrounding the former German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor von und zu Guttenberg, who resigned after facing accusations of plagiarism in parts of his doctoral thesis, raises troubling issues for all of us in academia. Guttenberg was an easy target: first, because he is a well-known politician; second, because his plagiarism was blatant, even though questions remain as to whether there was actual intention to mislead. The successful campaign to remove him from office was heralded as a remarkable victory for academics, who demanded that he acknowledge his mistakes and stand down. Had he not done so, his critics argued, the reputation of the German academic system could have been gravely damaged.

His error was not simply an academic one, like writing the wrong answer in an examination. Serious academic misconduct has wider implications, calling into question whether a person can be trusted with any task, let alone the conduct of public affairs. Politicians who obtained an academic degree by deception should be treated no differently from those found to have fiddled their parliamentary expenses or employed an illegal alien as a housemaid.

Despite Guttenberg's resignation, the case reveals serious flaws in the academic practices not just of Germany, but of all countries. His immediate supervisor, as well as the faculty which conferred his now-withdrawn degree, seem guilty of a dereliction of duty. At the very least, one might have expected that some kind of formal checking procedure would exist, even if it was not followed. But, to my knowledge, such screening is not performed systematically, even though it is common practice for vetting undergraduate work. Disparities between disciplines are also a thorny issue. According to some commentators, Guttenberg's fault was simply to have omitted quotation marks and citations, since quoting at length from other works is accepted practice in much of the humanities and social sciences.

In molecular biology, where most of the research literature is freely available online, at least for those active in research, the opportunities for such misconduct might seem legion. Yet direct plagiarism is easy to detect using simple text-matching tools, now commonly employed by journal editors and publishers, including ourselves. Where doctoral theses are structured around peer-reviewed articles (co-) authored by the candidate, such safeguards exclude direct plagiarism, although the surrounding thesis, which can vary in size from a few pages to a voluminous work in its own right, still needs to be carefully scrutinized. There is an obvious danger that a lazy student will simply copy and paste chunks of text that have appeared in previous doctoral theses rather than peruse, analyse and crystallize the relevant background literature for himself. In countries where doctoral theses can contain mainly unpublished data and interpretation thereof, comprehensive vetting is required.

Although most faculties have nominal rules regarding plagiarism, implementation is patchy, and regulations have not kept pace with the burgeoning of electronic literature, nor changes in practice. Even journal publishers do not apply uniform standards. I recently heard a case of an editor of a prestigious journal whose attention was drawn to the fact that the introduction section of a paper published in the journal matched almost word for word a passage from a recently published review article. Her response was, ‘so what?’. She felt that the substance of the two papers being different negated this supposedly minor fault.

Self-plagiarism is a particularly grey area, even though most would consider it unacceptable in a doctoral thesis. A number of years ago, I was reading the draft of a PhD thesis from one of my own students, whose written English was poor. Virtually the entire text appeared to have been processed from the original Hungarian, using an early version of the Google translator. But suddenly, when I reached the second paragraph of the Discussion, I encountered a long passage written in grammatically impeccable, if slightly clunky English prose. Further analysis quickly confirmed my initial suspicion: I myself was the authors of this haploblock of text. At my insistence, she re-wrote the entire Discussion, and finally understood that the object of the exercise was not to produce a ‘perfect’ thesis, but to produce her own thesis. In the end, it was well appreciated by her examiners.

Not all such cases are so clear-cut. Paraphrasing of someone else's – or one's own – ‘perfect’ text is generally considered to be plagiarism just as serious as copy-pasting: arguably more so, since it reveals a blatant attempt to deceive. But it can hardly be avoided in some portions of a scientific dissertation: for example, there are only so many ways of stating that DNA was recovered by precipitation with two volumes of ethanol, followed by centrifugation.

Where does all this leave us? I believe we need to devise a universally agreed code of practice, accompanied by clear vetting procedures that specify the responsibility of the supervisor, the department and faculty in the process. Of course, we have not reached a globally accepted definition of what actually constitutes plagiarism, nor even what is a PhD. But, as in many areas of academic life, there is a serious danger that if we don't do it ourselves, some ghastly state bureaucracy will end up forcing us to do it ‘their’ way.

To protect the identity and reputation of third parties, some ‘facts’ in the above account have been deliberately falsified.

Copy and paste - NATURE

2011-05-25T22:48:00.003+03:00

Editorial
Nature 473, Pages:419–420 , Date published:(26 May 2011)

A slow university investigation into serious accusations of misconduct benefits no one.

As retractions go, it may not look like a big deal. Earlier this month, a statistics journal decided to pull a little-cited 2008 paper on the social networks of author–co-author relationships after it emerged that sections were plagiarized from textbooks and Wikipedia. The fact that this caused a wave of glee to ripple through the climate-change blogosphere takes some explaining.

Two of the paper's authors, Yasmin Said and Edward Wegman, both of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, are also authors of an infamous 2006 report to Congress, co-written with statistician David Scott of Rice University in Houston, Texas. That report took aim at climatologist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, suggesting that he was working in an isolated social network separated from “mainstream statisticians”, and that he had such close ties with the rest of the field that truly independent peer review of his work was not possible. This report came to be known as the Wegman report, and has been frequently cited by climate-change sceptics.

This social-network analysis of Mann and his co-authors — with Mann's name removed — was cut down to an academic paper and published two years later in the journal Computational Statistics & Data Analysis. It is this paper that the journal has decided to retract. So it seems likely that the plagiarism in the 2008 paper is also present in the 2006 Congress report. Still not look like a big deal?

That doubts about the 2006 report have resulted in concrete action is mainly down to the sterling work of an anonymous climate blogger called Deep Climate. His website first reported plagiarism in a different section of the congressional report in December 2009. One of those whose work was plagiarized is Raymond Bradley, director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Ironically, Bradley was one of the co-authors of the climate reconstructions criticized by the Wegman report. Bradley, alerted by Deep Climate, complained to George Mason University on 5 March last year.

Wegman has blamed a graduate student for the plagiarism. Daniel Walsch, spokesperson for George Mason University, says that an internal review of the matter began in the autumn. He cannot estimate when that review will be complete, and, until it is, he says, the university regards it as a “personnel matter” and will not comment further. He adds that the review is still in the “inquiry” phase to ascertain whether a full investigation should be held. “Whether it is fast or slow is not as important as it being thorough and fair,” says Walsch.

The fact that 14 months have passed since Bradley's complaint without it being resolved is disheartening but not unusual. An examination of George Mason University's misconduct policies suggests that investigations should be resolved within a year of the initial complaint, including time for an appeal by the faculty member in question. According to the university's own timeline, the initial inquiry should have been complete within 12 weeks of the initial complaint — in May 2010. But there are loopholes galore for extensions, and, like many universities, George Mason seems content to drag its feet.

Long misconduct investigations do not serve anyone, except perhaps university public-relations departments that might hope everyone will have forgotten about a case by the time it wraps up. But in cases such as Wegman's, in which the work in question has been cited in policy debates, there is good reason for haste. Policy informed by rotten research is likely to have its own soft spots. Those who have been wronged deserve resolution of the matter. And one can hardly suppose that those who have been wrongfully accused enjoy living under a cloud for months.

So, what incentives do universities have to pick up the pace? Agencies such as the US Office of Research Integrity and ethics offices at funding bodies should take universities to task for slow investigations and demand adherence to the schedules listed in university policies. However, the agencies themselves haven't exactly been models of swift justice. The most recent annual report from the Office of Research Integrity — for 2008 — reported that the cases closed in that year spent a mean of 14.1 months at the agency. Perhaps it should fall to accreditation agencies to push for speedy investigations. Tom Benberg, vice-president of the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools — the agency that accredits George Mason University — says that his agency might investigate if the university repeatedly ignored its own policies on the timing of misconduct inquiries. To get the ball rolling, he says, someone would have to file a well-documented complaint.

Even if funding and accreditation agencies fail to apply pressure, universities should take the initiative to move investigations along as speedily as possible while allowing time for due process. Once an investigation is complete, the institution should be as transparent as it can about what happened. Especially when public funds are involved, or at public universities, the taxpayer has a right to know what happened when papers are retracted — even if the faculty member in question is eventually exonerated. This tidies the scientific record, clears the air and kicks the legs out from under any conspiracy theories. Over to you, George Mason University.

Is Academic Corruption on the Rise? - INSIDE HIGHER ED

2011-05-22T13:37:00.008+03:00

Ivan Pacheco

In Germany Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the former Minister of Defense, and Silvana Koch-Mehrin, a Vice-President of the European Parliament, resigned from their positions after plagiarism was discovered in each person’s doctoral dissertation. In the UK, the London School of Economics had to address alleged plagiarism in the PhD thesis of Saif el-Islam Gaddafi, the famous son of Muhamar Gadafi. In Pakistan, over a hundred and forty lawmakers were found guilty of holding fake degrees, and in the UK, a university registrar was condemned to a suspended jail sentence after he was discovered trading fake degrees for spanking sessions.

More still. In 2009, the academic community and the public were shaken by the (so called) “climategate. ” The illegal interception of email correspondence between US and the UK researchers suggested the fabrication and manipulation of data in order to support the theory of human-instigated global warming. Yet after examination in each country no wrongdoing was proven. On May 2011, a report commissioned by a group of legislators in the US, known for their denial of climate change theory, was found (in large part) to be plagiarized underscoring the vulnerability of researchers and encouraging doubts about the reliability of anyone’s data.

Many believe that plagiarism and other forms of academic corruption are becoming more pervasive and the examples presented above might suggest that it is true. Before panicking, it is important to consider that the academic world is expanding, hence opportunities for academic corruption as well. The number of undergraduate and graduate students has been growing in almost every country around the world and those who enter the system stay for a longer time. (Just consider how much time it takes to get a Ph.D.) The personal investment is greater, as is the competition. In addition, there are more countries trying to move into the “big leagues of academia,” which adds even more pressure to the whole system.

Higher education and academic research have more impact on society today. Perhaps it is a consequence of being immersed in the modern knowledge economy. Most well-paid professional positions require a higher education credential (often a masters or a doctoral degree). Research has the potential to reshape the lives of millions of people, also the potential to return wealth to the researcher and prestige (and improved position in rankings) to the institution that hosts him or her. Additionally, research is often used to justify public policy. The stakes have become much higher.

A question that is not asked very often is what motivates people to plagiarize and why others resist it. One possible answer is that academic corruption is both a consequence and a symptom of the growing importance of higher education in the world. Because education, research, and publication are connected to valuable goods of society, such as money and prestige, it should not be surprising that some people decide to take shortcuts to get academic credentials that will provide access to those rewards.

Academic corruption is certainly more visible now than, lets say, decades ago, and academic knowledge exercises an increasingly important influence in most societies. The mass media and the social networking tools have contributed to greater awareness of corruption.

Academic corruption’s surreptitious nature makes it almost impossible to track the extent of the problem, not to mention benchmark today’s corruption against fraud committed a century ago in order to know if it is indeed growing and to what extent. It is easier to measure the perception of corruption, something that the organization Transparency International recognized a couple decades ago. Still, many people are convinced that actual corruption is on the rise. Some claim that the Internet has make plagiarism easier because today it just takes a few keystrokes to copy and paste a few pages or a complete dissertation. Certainly, technology makes academic corruption easier to commit, but it also makes it easier to get caught.

There is a silent war against academic corruption, and what we see in the media is just the tip of the iceberg. The targets include lazy students cheating on term papers; wannabe doctors cheating on exams, research and publications; and ghostwriters providing their services to a wide clientele. There are a growing number of computer programs to identify these abuses but with limited impact. And these programs generally only detect the repetition of words sequences.

As a warning to those who don’t want to bother attending a university to earn their degree but prefer buying their diploma and transcripts, there is a small but efficient number of people and agencies identifying diploma mills and disseminating information. Some countries and institutions now have high-tech test rooms to anticipate and neutralize high-tech and low-tech cheating strategies on admissions exams. Employers are outsourcing the screening of employee credentials.

Is academic corruption truly on the rise? Is it equivalent to the war on drug traffic, a war no one can ever win? What do you think?

Guest blogger, Ivan Pacheco, has over ten years of higher education experience including his roles as Director of Quality Assurance for the Colombian Ministry of Education, acting Vice Minister of Higher Education, and board member for more than ten Colombian public universities. He is currently writing his doctoral thesis at the Center for International Higher Education where he posts news of academic fraud to the Higher Education Corruption Monitor on the Center's website: www.bc.edu/cihe.

Online plagiarism hunters track doctoral frauds (DW-WORLD)

2011-05-17T21:00:00.002+03:00

The recent revelations of plagiarism by prominent Germans wouldn't be possible without the diligent work of an online community called PlagiPedi. They're working to restore the reputation of German doctoral titles.

The list of targets for a group of online plagiarism hunters is long: over 200 doctoral theses have been flagged by the Internet platform PlagiPedi for a more thorough inspection of their originality. Doctoral theses by famous personalities such as Chancellor Angela Merkel, former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and Deutsche Bank head Josef Ackermann are among those slated for a closer look.

Exactly who is behind the online hunt for plagiarists is unknown. Most work with pseudonyms, such as "Dr. Martin Click," who takes care of media requests. Click answers most questions in writing, and does not want to reveal his real name.

He says he's from northern Germany, has a PhD in engineering and is planning a career in research.

"Unfortunately, a person who uncovers these things often gets a reputation for being a whistle-blower in certain fields," says Click. "As long as that's the case, I don't see any reason to put my career as a an academic on the line. A pseudonym offers a certain amount of protection." >>>

POGO to NIH: Stop Academic Ghostwriting Pollution - AHRP

2011-05-14T09:01:00.006+03:00

Project on Government Oversight (POGO) asked NIH Director to take a firm stance against ghostwriting by academics who receive taxpayer funded grants.

POGO reminds the director of the National Institutes of Health (posted below) that taxpayers provide the NIH with $30 billion annually to fund biomedical research. But the proliferation of ghostwritten reports by federally funded researchers are undermining the integrity of NIH, the scientific literature, and result in medical practices that cause patients harm.>>>

Band of Academic-Plagiarism Sleuths Undoes German Politicians - THE CHRONICLE of HIGHER EDUCATION

2011-05-14T00:02:00.001+03:00

By Aisha Labi

The bad news keeps coming for the disgraced former German defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, a once-rising star in his country's conservative party. On Wednesday the University of Bayreuth published the full report of its investigation into plagiarism in his 2006 doctoral dissertation in law.

The university's assessment, which Mr. Guttenberg had initially sought to prevent from being made public, was unsparing: Not only was most of his dissertation plagiarized from a range of sources, including newspapers, journals, and the official research service for German parliamentarians, which lawmakers are forbidden to use for personal purposes, but even if the work had been Mr. Guttenberg's, it would not have merited the summa cum laude it was originally awarded.

The revelations of how extensively Mr. Guttenberg had plagiarized came as no surprise to one group of people: an online community of plagiarism detectors that formed since the allegations against him came to light. That loose band of academic vigilantes helped to compile and disseminate the information that eventually brought about Mr. Guttenberg's downfall. Its members have since set their sights on other high-profile figures, and, although they do not work directly with universities, their online sleuthing is having an impact.

Also on Wednesday, the University of Konstanz announced that it had stripped Veronica Sass, the daughter of another leading conservative politician, of her law doctorate. Another politician, Silvana Koch-Mehrin, whose doctoral dissertation is under investigation by the University of Heidelberg, stepped down on Wednesday from her posts as a vice president of the European Parliament and the board of her political party.

Part of the explanation for the apparent proliferation of plagiarism among politicians is the prevalence of doctoral degrees among figures outside of academe. Many German politicians and business leaders have doctoral titles and have few qualms about using them, even if they never set foot on a university campus after they earn their degrees.

"Everybody has their name on their door in bronze and wants to have their doctoral title there, too; that's really important," said Debora Weber-Wulff, a professor of media and computing at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin who has been active in the recent online plagiarism-detecting movement. The attitude toward academic titles, she said, has much to do with the traditional German reverence of learning. "Someone who has a doctorate is highly respected," she said.

Online Teamwork

Mr. Guttenberg was hardly the only German politician to proudly affix "Dr." to his name, but he was the first to be subjected to the forensic scrutiny of an online examination of his academic bona fides. The allegations against him first came to light in February, when a law professor at the University of Bremen raised questions about the minister's dissertation in a newspaper article. Events snowballed from there, said Tim Bartel, who works as country manager in Germany for Wikia, a for-profit sister company of the Wikimedia Foundation, and an online community dedicated to examining Mr. Guttenberg's thesis soon took shape.

A handful of bloggers began looking into Mr. Guttenberg's dissertation and posting their findings in a variety of online forums. As their output grew, it became clear that they would need a more hospitable venue than so many disparate sites or even the Google document that had been created, which allowed access to only about 100 people. The original creator of the site where they ended up collaborating, GuttenPlag Wiki, was a doctoral candidate with a background in online gaming, through which he was familiar with the collaborative wikia format, said Mr. Bartel. Like many who have been active in the online plagiarism-hunting effort, that person, who goes by the handle PlagDoc, prefers to remain pseudonymous.

At the start, said Mr. Bartel, he and PlagDoc were the only two GuttenPlag participants. By the end of the site's first day in operation, about 20 people were active online. "It's pretty hard to say the exact number of people that are involved," said Mr. Bartel. Because there is no requirement for participants to sign up, some flit in and out of the forum while others are active on a regular basis. "Some people don't come back, some people just sign in to fix a typo, some people join every day and work for several hours."

Max Ruppert, a doctoral candidate in journalism studies at the Technical University of Dortmund, and another doctoral candidate conducted an online survey of GuttenPlag participants during what Mr. Ruppert describes as its "hot phase," when thousands were logging in each day. The results allowed them to form a profile of who was active on the site.

They identified a "hard core" of 140 participants who were coming regularly to the site and taking the initiative in leading and managing online tasks. The successor site that has continued to investigate other allegations of plagiarism, VroniPlag Wiki, has many of the same active users, said Mr. Bartel.

Color-Coding Copying

Organizing online work was a challenge, especially since at the outset there was no real-time communication. Soon after an online chat forum was set up, it was drawing around 100 active users at a time, and participants were then able to make sure there was little overlap as they dissected Mr. Guttenberg's dissertation page by page. Site members created a means of identifying which pages contained plagiarized material, assigning a bar-code pattern to indicate plagiarism.

The more bars in the pattern, the more plagiarism a page contained. "White means it was checked and there was no plagiarism, black means plagiarism, and red means plagiarism on this page from more than one source," said Mr. Bartel. By the end, he said, "I think there are only about 5 percent of the pages on his thesis where there was no plagiarism, which was the opposite of what we had expected."

Although Mr. Guttenberg resigned in early March, the university also began looking into his thesis, spurred in part by the avalanche of coverage in the mainstream news media, much of which relied on GuttenPlag's digging. In its full findings announced on Wednesday, it placed the blame squarely on Mr. Guttenberg and cleared itself and Mr. Guttenberg's supervising professor of wrongdoing.

Ms. Weber-Wulff says she believes, however, that at least part of the responsibility for the culture that enabled Mr. Guttenberg to get away with such an egregious violation lies with Germany's higher-education system. There is a longstanding notion that professors own all the work done under their supervision, and many are guilty of plagiarism, she said. "In Germany the professors let their doctoral students write for them and then publish under their own name. Doctoral students then steal from the bachelor's and master's students under them. We end up having plagiarism all the way down," she said.

One way of eliminating at least part of the problem would be to cut down on the proliferation of doctoral degrees. "We need to leave the doctoral titles in academia where they belong," she said.

A good day for transparency

2011-05-11T21:10:00.003+03:00

Daniel Mietchen

Some brief excerpts from today’s news on matters of plagiarized dissertations in Germany: >>>

Research ethics: science faces On Fact and Fraud (Ars Technica)

2011-05-10T09:12:00.010+03:00

By JOHN TIMMER

David Goodstein has a unique perspective on scientific fraud, having pursued a successful career in research physics before becoming the provost of Caltech, one of the world's premier research institutions. As an administrator, he helped formulate Caltech's first policy for scientific misconduct and applied it to a number of prominent cases—all of which should put him in an excellent position to provide a rich and comprehensive overview of scientific frauds and other forms of research misconduct.

Unfortunately, his book On Fact and Fraud doesn't quite live up to this promise. Goodstein devotes most of the book to case studies of fraud or potential misconduct. Although many of the individual chapters are excellent, they don't come together to form a coherent picture of what constitutes misconduct or how to recognize it.>>>

How journal editors can detect and deter scientific misconduct?

2011-05-03T19:03:00.002+03:00

Misconduct happens. So what can journal editors do find and prevent it?

While we don’t claim to be experts in working on the other side of the fence — eg as editors — Ivan was flattered to be asked by session organizers at the Council of Science Editors to appear on a panel on the subject. He was joined on the panel by:

Science executive editor Monica Bradford

Annals of Internal Medicine editor in chief Christine Laine

American Association for Cancer Research publisher Diane Scott-Lichter

Committee on Publication Ethics’s Liz Wager

Their presentations were chock-full of good tips and data. Bradford, for example, said that Science had published 45 retractions since 1997. And Laine recommended copying all of a manuscript’s authors on every communication, which could help prevent author forgery that seems to be creeping into the literature. >>>

Turkish testing official embroiled in new academic scandal

2011-04-21T06:32:00.003+03:00

A top educational official already embroiled in a controversy over an alleged cheating scandal on a national exam has been accused of academic plagiarism.

According to the new claims, Professor Ali Demir, the chairman of Turkey’s Student Selection and Placement Center, or ÖSYM, plagiarized in an article he wrote while working as a lecturer at Loughborough University in 1990. He was reportedly saved from being fired through the intervention of influential scholars at the university.

Demir worked at Loughborough University as a lecturer after completing his doctoral degree at the school. During this period, he penned a nine-part series of articles for a Turkish magazine called “Teknik ve Tekstil” (Technology and Textile). The series appeared to be entirely the work of Demir, but the new allegations say it was instead nearly a word-for-word translation of work by a German writer named Peter Latzke.

Latzke was only mentioned by Demir in a brief acknowledgement in the first part of the series.

The claim of plagiarism was first made by Professor Mike Denton of Leeds University, who brought his allegations to the attention of the Loughborough University administration. They were communicated to Professor Gordon Wray, the head of the school’s textile department, who immediately proceeded to launch an investigation into the matter.

Following a long series of discussions and meetings, Wray accepted as a compromise a written apology from Demir, to be published in the magazine.

“Associate Professor Demir has just obtained written permission for this work from [European textile journal] Melliand Textilberichte. Associate Professor Demir apologizes to both Mr. P.M. Latzke as well as to Melliand Textilberichte for not having obtained written permission prior to the publishing of the series,” said the explanation at the beginning of the ninth and last part in the series.

Demir has recently come into the spotlight in Turkey for his alleged role in a cheating scandal that has erupted around the university entrance exam that took place March 27. ISTANBUL - Radikal

Koch-Mehrin plagiarism charges thicken

2011-04-20T06:41:00.004+03:00

Silvana Koch-Mehrin, a leading light of Germany's Free Democratic Party and vice president of the European Parliament, has been accused of widely plagiarising her doctoral dissertation.

A preliminary report released by the internet platform Vroniplag Wiki says 56 of the 201 pages of the MEP’s dissertation contained provable incidents of plagiarism.

Koch-Mehrin got her doctorate for a dissertation entitled, ‘Historic Currency Union between Economy and Politics’ at Heidelberg University. Dons there have already started an academic investigation after allegations were first made against Koch-Mehrin.

Although this investigation could take weeks, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that it could still be finished by the FDP's party convention in the middle of May.

It said that should that investigation conclude she stole a significant amount of her dissertation it would not only be a major setback for the 40-year-old’s considerable political ambitions. It would also be a body blow for her party which despite having ditched its unpopular leader Guido Westerwelle for Health Minister Philipp Rösler, still languishes below the five percent mark in many opinion polls.

The Vroniplag Wiki report said that not only did 56 of the 201 pages include plagiarism, but that the sources were, “noticeably often articles from textbooks dealing with economic theory and economic and social history.”

It said that in at least four places, her work included more than three-quarters of a page of plagiarised text.

The report concluded that sources were used to a considerable degree but were not well-enough sourced as quotes. “This presents a blatant break with academic standards,” the report said.

Perhaps even more damaging, the report said that, “The frequent changes to the plagiarised texts as well as the fact that these were to be found all through the entire dissertation, leads to the conclusion that the taking of text was not a mistake but was done knowingly.”

The site then raises the question of whether the dissertation was a misuse of tax money as it was funded by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, with money from the Federal Ministry for Education, Science, Research and Technology.

The former Defence Minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg of the Christian Social Union was forced to resign at the start of March after his doctoral dissertation was found to have been widely plagiarised. In comparison to his, that of Koch-Mehrin was not as bad, according to a member of the Vroniplag Wiki platform involved in the investigation.

“If you compare this with the Tour de France, then we could say that we have caught Koch-Mehrin doping, while Guttenberg rode off on a motorbike,” a spokesman told the Frankfurter Rundschau daily. “But you get banned for doping too,” he added.

Koch-Mehrin has not yet commented on the allegations. The Local/hc

Keeping science fair

2011-04-16T12:03:00.001+03:00

Alex Holcombe

Blind justice. A beautiful ideal! That the merits of a case are to be decided without regard to the identities of the parties involved or the size of their bank accounts.

This is something science aspires to in evaluating manuscripts for publication. In fact it’s fundamental to the integrity of science- when you read an article in a scientific journal, the idea is that you should know that the article went through the same review process as all the others.

The science you see in a prestigious journal is not there because the authors paid more than others did, but rather because the science was evaluated as high quality on its own merits. There are flaws in the process, such as the bias that occurs because usually the reviewers know who the manuscript authors are, but at least there’s no real money involved- nothing as meretricious as some cash to grease the wheels.

But now money has started to infiltrate the system. Several journals are now accepting money for “fast-track” services. It is hard to see how this policy can be implemented without sometimes giving the monied authors an advantage over those who don’t pay. Fast-tracking seems likely to leads to shortcut by the editor or reviewers as they seek to meet the fast-tracking deadline. And it seems these journals won’t even indicate which manuscripts benefited from fast-tracking and which didn’t.

Please join us in signing an open protest letter that we’ll soon send to these journals.

Plagiarism: Can It Be Stopped?

2011-04-13T23:56:00.007+03:00

G. Jay Christensen,
Business Communication Quarterly, published online 13 April 2011

PLAGIARISM CAN BE CONTROLLED, not stopped. The more appropriate question to ask is: What can be done to encourage students to “cheat” correctly by doing the assignment the way it was intended? I have lived my professional teaching life with the philosophy that if students are given a chance to cheat, they may accept that opportunity. Cheating by college students continues to reach epidemic proportions on selected campuses, as witnessed by the recent episode at Central Florida University, where more than 200 seniors cheated on a midterm examination. I applaud the professor who, in his strategy management class, harangued the students about their need to come forward and admit their cheating. Plagiarism is only one form of cheating and is usually defined as using someone else’s words or ideas as your own without giving credit to the original. >>>

LETTER To the Editors' and Authors

2011-03-18T14:00:00.003+02:00

Irulandy Ponniah

As a freelance reviewer for few journals based in India, I am often engrossed with the review of manuscripts being sent to me, especially, in the recent past. Understandably, the culture of increased manuscript submission was the consequence of governing body regulations in India, which had suddenly awakened to instill a sense of continuing education in the minds of the teaching faculty.

As most were trained as good practitioners’ than reasonable science writers, it is not unusual for prospective authors’ to rely on previously published materials to gain an overview before they start to write. And inevitably, they may also subconsciously reproduce few exact sentences from other print materials amounting to plagiarism. But what actually constitutes text plagiarism? According to Pecorari [1], copying word for word from source text rather than spontaneous composition is considered text plagiarism. He also believes that in-text citation of the sourced material is more important than “simply listing a work in the reference list” [1]. The quoted phrase is repeated from the cited authors’ own words, which does not constitute plagiarism, but a whole article cannot be legitimately written with just quotation marks.

The perception of text plagiarism might vary among authors and academic experts in India. What with authors (when confronted) claiming as coincidental or believe on the lines that “borrowing sentences in the part of a paper does not amount to plagiarism, especially, when the results are original” [2].

Although, it is widely believed that editors are indifferent towards charges of plagiarism [3], I present few instances of suspected plagiarism and the response of the concerned journal editors in India. In case one, the reader found that there was substantial textual copying (with or without attribution) in an article published in a journal, and in case two and three, textual copying was detected at the stage of peer review. In the latter instance, on appraisal, the editors of the concerned journals promptly rejected the manuscripts. On the other hand, in case one, there was denial of textual plagiarism by one of the experts while the other deemed it as ‘unintentional’. A similar allegation with an international journal, which after expert evaluation, swiftly acted on the charge of plagiarism. Incidentally, the author was also the journal editor where there was denial of outright plagiarism by one of the reviewers. Arguably, the reviewer is likely to be correct in his view as his opinion might have been based on the assumption that “today’s patch-writer is tomorrow’s competent academic writer, given the necessary support to develop” [1].

The US office for research integrity (see http://ori.dhhs.gov/policies/plagiarism.shtml) defines text plagiarism as substantial unattributed textual copying of others. However, it excludes limited usage of pertinent sentences. But this should not be construed to mean that limited copy-typed texts from wider sources not amount to plagiarism.

The electronic resource made it possible both in terms of copying and detection of such tactics [4]. This is evident from the reasons assigned for retracted papers (see http://blogs.wiley.com/publishingnews/2010/06/30/retractions-in-wiley-blackwell-journals/). In just 7 months (September 2009 to March 2010) 17 cases were retracted for text duplication (29%) and serious error plus text duplication in another 6% of retractions. A search (Pubmed) with keywords like “retraction and India” would show that 63% of retractions involved a particular authors’. This indicates that plagiarism or academic fraud is committed more often by repeat offenders.

A number of journal editor’s uses software (see http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100705/full/466167a.html) to screen manuscripts for the degree of text similarity at the time of submission. This would definitely save time and energy not only for the journals, but also for the reviewers. The move by a medical university, in India, to check plagiarism in the submitted dissertation or PhD thesis is a step in the right direction to discourage textual plagiarism (http://www.tnmmu.ac.in/plagiarism.htm). But, however, screening with software may also produce too many results for a document when there is slight overlap with other sources (see http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0702012). For example, copy the first paragraph above and paste in the “input your text” column in eTBLAST (see http://etest.vbi.vt.edu/etblast3/) for similarity based text-matching to find the number of matching results which would take considerable time by manual checks to establish whether plagiarism or not [5].

Although, a number of software is in use and increasingly, journals have become alert to detect plagiarism, it is in the hands of science writers and researchers to attenuate plagiarism (in any form) before readers stop trusting scientific messages.

Conflict of interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.

References
1. Pecorari D (2003) Good and original: plagiarism and patchwriting in academic second-language writing. J Sec Lang Writ 12:317–345
2. Yilmaz I (2007) Plagiarism? No, we’re borrowing better English. Nature 449:658
3. Wager E, Fiack S, Graf C, Robinson A, Rowlands I (2009) Science journal editors’ views on publication ethics: results of an international survey. J Med Ethics 35:348–353
4. Stafford N (2010) Science in the digital age. Nature 467:S19–S21
5. Errami M, Garner H (2008) A tale of two citations. Nature 451:397–399

Journal of Maxillofacial and Oral Surgery
DOI: 10.1007/s12663-011-0193-1

Medical journals retract "unethical" research

2011-03-18T06:09:00.002+02:00

(Reuters) - The editors of 16 international medical journals have retracted "unethical" research carried out by a German doctor on drugs known as colloids, which boost blood volume in patients having surgery.>>>

Ethics in Oncology: Lies, Big and Small, Matter - Relatively few scientific papers retracted

2011-03-15T15:16:00.005+02:00

Ronald Piana

The Asco Post, Volume 2, Issue 5

A recent study in the Journal of Medical Ethics found that 788 research papers published in medical journals between 2000 and 2010 were retracted for serious errors or falsified data.^1,2 Study author Grant Steen, PhD, told The ASCO Post that U.S. scientists were responsible for 169 of the papers retracted for inadvertent yet serious errors, as well as 84 papers retracted for blatant fraud. "In any case, during the sample period I used for the study, nearly 5 million papers were published, so the short version of what I found is that relatively few scientific papers are retracted," said Dr. Steen.

Yet, Dr. Steen noted an interesting, if not alarming pattern. "Among the papers retracted for error, only about 18% of authors had a previous retraction. However, among papers retracted for out-and-out fraud, more than half of those authors had previous retractions," said Dr. Steen.

According to Dr. Steen, this finding can be interpreted in two ways. Authors of a fraudulent paper are likely to have all their papers retracted, whether or not fraud or error was committed in each publication. "But the other explanation, which I tend to favor, is that people who engage in fraud have a pattern of abusing the literature," said Dr. Steen.

While it is impossible to look into the mind or motive of another, there are some things we can discern from patterns that emerge in studies such as Dr. Steen's. Since falsified papers were more likely to appear in high-profile medical journals as opposed to less prestigious publications, we can intuit that the "publish or perish" ethos might be a factor behind this behavior. "We need to be cautious; some clinical researchers perceive a paper published in a journal with a high impact factor as an open door to an upward career move, and they are willing to falsify data to walk through that door," said Dr. Steen >>>

Notes on a scandal

2011-03-14T06:23:00.001+02:00

EDITORIAL
Nature Volume: 471, Pages: 135–136 , doi:10.1038/471135b

How an organism is affected by a particular gene mutation, as every geneticist knows, depends on that organism's genetic background. Although an obesity mutation introduced into one strain of mouse might produce a fat animal with diabetes, the same mutation in a mouse strain of slightly different genetic background could create a fat but otherwise healthy animal.

Similarly, the effects of a cry of academic distress seem to depend on a community's societal background. How else to explain the contrasting results of two academic revelations: the plagiarism affair that consumed Germany for two weeks until academic disapproval forced the resignation of the defence minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, on 1 March — and an exposé of comparable wrongdoing by the Italian minister of education, Mariastella Gelmini, in 2008, which had zero impact.

The German scandal broke on 16 February, when the daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung revealed that the hugely popular Guttenberg had apparently taken a short cut to his doctorate in law by copying other published works without attribution in his thesis. The report sparked an intense reaction hard to imagine in countries such as the United States and Britain, where the academic achievements (if any) or failures of politicians are not considered serious issues.

German citizens looked to the Internet to discover the extent of Guttenberg's plagiarism, which turned out to be quite shameless. The University of Bayreuth withdrew his PhD and is now investigating whether he had just been careless or had intended to deceive. At first, Guttenberg attempted to underplay the importance of “inadequate footnotes” in a thesis; the issue faded to insignificance, he implied, next to his momentous political mission of reorganizing the German armed forces and controlling their presence in Afghanistan. His popularity among the general public remained undiminished, and Chancellor Angela Merkel, herself a PhD physicist, tried to limit damage to her government by saying that she had “hired a politician, not a scientific assistant”. That was a fatal mistake. Within days, tens of thousands of PhD holders had signed a letter deploring her “mockery” of an academic system that represented decency, honour and responsibility — attributes that they insisted should be reflected in a democratic government. Crushed by this attack of righteousness, Guttenberg finally resigned.

Like Guttenberg, Gelmini was a graduate in law. And like him, she felt that her driving ambition justified taking short cuts in academic procedures to get the degree that would help her political career. In 2001 she travelled from her home town of Brescia in the north of Italy to Reggio Calabria, in the far south, to sit her bar exams. At the time, pass rates in the north were below 10%, compared with a rate of suspiciously more than 90% in Reggio Calabria, a city otherwise known for low academic standards. After the press revealed the Reggio Calabria bar exam to be a scam, the Italian academic community called for Gelmini's resignation — to no avail. The irony of having a minister with responsibility for universities who herself cheerfully admits to having dodged academic rules is not lost on the community.

In Germany, Italy and neighbouring countries in Europe, politicians are frequently drawn from academia. Credentials help political careers, and nearly 20% of the German parliament hold PhDs. But then, almost 9% of Italian parliamentarians are university professors, so the differing reactions to calls for resignation prompted by scholastic misdemeanours cannot be down to ignorance about how universities work. Instead, the difference seems to be based on how large a threat each government considers the weapon of moral correctness to be — and how dangerous is the academic community wielding that weapon.

Should anyone really have expected the government of Silvio Berlusconi to fear such a weapon?

It is more surprising, and gratifying, to find that in Germany, one of the world's richest and most powerful countries, rage against an academic cheat can provoke serious consequences. Not only was Guttenberg popular, but he hadn't previously made any serious political errors that would have seen charges of plagiarism considered the last straw.

Still, there may not be a lesson for many other countries here. Germany is known as the 'country of poets and philosophers' — a rare societal background, and one apparently conducive to propagation of honourable academic values. Like our more fortunate mutant mouse, all there seems plump and healthy, even as it remains unfathomably mysterious to those on the outside.

German Public Misunderstands Plagiarism

2011-03-13T14:47:00.004+02:00

"...They really don't get it. So many people think of this as just a little bit of cheating just like everyone does on their taxes and stuff. They do not understand that plagiarism pulls the carpet out from under science." >>>

German defense minister Guttenberg resigns .

2011-03-01T16:48:00.008+02:00

German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has announced his resignation after weeks of criticism over plagiarising parts of his Ph.D. thesis."It's the most painful decision of my life," Guttenberg said at a press conference in Berlin.

Guttenberg made it clear it wasn't easy to give up the position, saying it was "unsatisfactory, but all too human." He added that he wanted to avoid "political damage."

Guttenberg thanked German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her support over the past few weeks. He said "I was always ready to fight, but I reached the limits of my strength.">>>

An Open Letter to the Chancellor

2011-02-26T20:32:00.002+02:00

German scientists and doctoral students are signing an open letter to the German Chancellor by the droves. There are some 7000 signatures as of Feb. 26, 2011. >>>

German minister loses doctorate after plagiarism row

2011-02-24T10:00:00.001+02:00

Germany's defence minister has been stripped of his university doctorate after he was found to have copied large parts of his work from others.

Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, an aristocrat who lives in a Bavarian castle, admitted breaching standards but denied deliberately cheating.

Analysis revealed that more than half of his thesis had long sections lifted word-for-word from the work of others.

So far the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has stood by the minister.

The University of Bayreuth decided that Mr Guttenberg had "violated scientific duties to a considerable extent".

It deplored the fact that he had lifted sections of text without attribution.

Last week Mr Guttenberg said he would temporarily give up his PhD title while the university investigated the charges of plagiarism. He admitted that he had made "serious mistakes".

His thesis - Constitution and Constitutional Treaty: Constitutional Developments in the US and EU - was completed in 2006 and published in 2009.

Chancellor Merkel insisted on Monday that she was standing by her defence minister, who was seen as something of a rising star in her conservative coalition.

"I appointed Guttenberg as minister of defence," she told reporters.

"I did not appoint him as an academic assistant or doctor. What is important to me is his work as minister of defence and he carries out these duties perfectly."

German minister gives up doctorate after plagiarism row

2011-02-22T14:03:00.004+02:00

Germany's defence minister has given up his doctoral title for good, after allegations that he had plagiarised sections of his thesis.

Last week Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg said he would temporarily give up the title while his university investigated the charges.

The University of Bayreuth says he has now asked them to retract his doctorate in law, according to German TV.

Mr Guttenberg admitted that he had made "serious mistakes".>>>

Misconduct and adventure - TheScientist

2011-02-18T19:50:00.005+02:00

The Lab, a new interactive film from the Office of Research Integrity, is a fresh approach to research misconduct training.

The entire film is online at ORI's website.

Why Cheating is Wrong

2011-02-09T21:47:00.008+02:00

Scott Williams & Michael Courtney

Abstract: Mathieu Bouville’s "Why is cheating wrong?" (Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29(1), 67-76, 2010) misses the mark by failing to consider the longer term consequences of cheating on student character development and longer term societal consequences of undermining professional expertise and trust in disciplines where an earned degree is an essential part of professional certification and qualifications. Educators who turn a blind eye to student cheating are cheating the public by failing to deliver on the promise of graduates who genuinely earned their degrees.

Keywords: academic dishonesty, academic integrity, academic misconduct, education, ethics, homework, plagiarism

Intellectual gymnastics (Bouville 2010) do not change the fact that cheating is wrong. In a series of self-limiting arguments, the author repeatedly dismisses the negative effects of cheating, suggests cheating is essentially equivalent to dysfunctional pedagogy, and claims cheating is therefore wrong only to the extent that it has material consequences on learning and assessment. That cheating – to practice fraud or deceit (cheating n.d.) – is wrong independent of academic consequences is dismissed. Yet the objective wrongness of cheating is the central issue. Moreover, while the author offers legitimate criticism of common pedagogical practices, the uses and efficacy of grades, and the sometimes misplaced focus of the academic system, his attempts to dismiss the effects of cheating in light of these concerns ring hollow. Imperfections in sincere efforts to engage and assess student learning cannot be equated with deliberate attempts to defraud the system.

The negative effects of cheating go far beyond immediate issues such as diluting the meaning of grades, creating inequity between students, or undermining the learning environment, even if the effects of these things are less substantial than is generally perceived. Since actions form habits, and habits form character, academic dishonesty builds into the character a propensity for dishonesty. In addition, since academic credentials are criteria for professional certifications, academic dishonesty carries the risk of the unfounded illusion of professional competence. How many readers relish the thought of being treated by doctors who cheated in their anatomy and physiology courses, or having important lab tests performed by technicians who fraudulently secured (via cheating) their required certifications?

An individual’s character and integrity are paramount. Here at the United States Air Force Academy, our mission is to commission leaders of character who are prepared to honorably serve their nation. The nation expects and requires its military officers to uphold their oaths of office, adhere to the highest standards of conduct, effectively lead those in their command, and steward both weapons of war and secrets of national security. Furthermore, earned degrees are required components for certification of professional competence in many areas of military service. Cheating at any stage of officer development and regardless of immediate consequences is therefore absolutely incompatible with the profession of arms. What nation wants military officers in charge of navigation, engineering, or other technical issues related to national security who cheated their way through coursework rather than demonstrating genuine competence in required subject areas? What nation is eager to entrust the lives of its sons and daughters or its weapons of war to those who cannot even demonstrate faithfulness in college coursework?

It is sophistry to argue, "Breaking a rule is illegitimate only if the rule is legitimate. Either the rule has a rational justification and this rather than breaking a rule makes cheating wrong, or the rule is arbitrary and there is no reason to endorse it." (Bouville 2010) The legitimacy of rules rests in the legitimacy of the issuing authority; it is not given to individual students to whimsically decide whether or not the rules apply to them, especially when the student has agreed (implicitly or explicitly) to the rules by virtue of enrollment. To claim otherwise is to promote anarchy – a chaotic system with no real standards as students choose for themselves what feels right to them. How many citizens are eager to live in a country where the police and the military only follow the rules they deem to have adequate rational justification? The human mind has infinite capacity for finding flaws in the "rational justification" of rules that the human heart is inclined to disobey. Due process in the making and enforcing of rules and laws of orderly society does not require "rational justification" to the satisfaction of every individual who has a duty of compliance.

People expect their doctors, their pilots, their engineers, and their military officers to have genuinely earned their professional credentials and to meet rigorous standards in areas of knowledge and conduct necessary for public trust in the performance of their duties. Cheating is wrong because academic dishonesty in the training of these professions undermines both the expected level of expertise and the expected level of trust. Educators have a duty to society to ensure the quality of graduates, and this duty includes good faith efforts to prevent academic dishonesty.

Bouville, M. (2010) Why is cheating wrong? Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29(1), 67-76.
cheating. (n.d.).Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved January 29, 2010,

from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cheating >>>

Editors Crack Down on Plagiarism With Help of Detective Software

2011-02-05T06:14:00.008+02:00

Adam Marcus

Gastroenterology & Endoscopy News

If a plagiarist plagiarizes from an author who has plagiarized, do we call it a wash and go for a beer?

That scenario is precisely what Steven L. Shafer, MD, found himself facing recently. Dr. Shafer, editor-in-chief of Anesthesia & Analgesia (A&A), learned that authors of a 2008 case report in his publication had lifted two-and-a-half paragraphs of text from a 2004 paper published in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia.
A contrite retraction letter, which appeared in the December 2010 issue of A&A, from the lead author, Sushma Bhatnagar, MD, of New Delhi, called the plagiarism “unintended” and apologized for the incident. Straightforward enough.

But then things got sticky. The December issue of A&A also retracted a 2010 manuscript by Turkish researchers who, according to Dr. Shafer, plagiarized from at least five other published papers—one of which happens to have been a 2008 article by Dr. Bhatnagar in the Journal of Palliative Medicine.

“Dr. Bhatnagar’s paper in Anesthesia & Analgesia was retracted because it contained text taken from a paper by Dr. Munir,” Dr. Shafer said. “However, Dr. Bhatnagar’s paper in the Journal of Palliative Medicine is one of the source journals for the plagiarism by Dr. Memis. To give you an idea how widespread this is, we recently rejected a paper that copied large blocks of text from a paper by Dr. Memis”

Plagiarism’s No Joke
As farcical as the case of merry-go-round cheating might be at first blush, journal editors are far from amused by the episode and similar incidents. Dr. Shafer, for example, estimates that he spends up to one-third of his time dealing with lifted text or, less commonly, fraudulent presentations of data in manuscripts. He still devotes several hours each week to sorting out the aftermath of the Scott Reuben, MD, fiasco—a sweeping case of data fabrication that led to the retraction of 21 papers, 11 of which appeared in A&A. He expects the fallout to linger for years.

Dr. Shafer said his journal is now running every submitted manuscript through CrossCheck, a copy-checking system that allows editors and publishers to screen papers for signs of plagiarism. A&A, through its publisher Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, belongs to a consortium called CrossRef, one of whose goals is to prevent misuse of previously published material using CrossCheck, which screens manuscripts against a database of articles in order to detect possible plagiarism.

Robert Creutz, general manager of iThenticate, which makes the software that powers CrossCheck, said the plagiarism catcher now has access to some 50,000 titles and 28 million published articles. “We can generally evaluate a manuscript in anywhere from 45 seconds to three minutes,” Mr. Creutz said.

Individual customers pay $1,000 per year for 500 pages of checking. Members of the CrossRef consortium have a different arrangement. They pay 75 cents per manuscript (under 25,000 words) but earned the discount by agreeing to provide iThenticate with access to thousands of papers upfront as seed for the database.

“I’m seeing a lot of journals overseas that are taking advantage of the technology,” Mr. Creutz said. The motivation appears to be competing with established journals and improving impact factor, he added.

Dr. Shafer said that since his journal began screening manuscripts routinely for signs of plagiarism, he has identified about a dozen papers with unacceptable amounts of verbatim text from other sources. That’s a rate of approximately one in 10 submissions to A&A, he said.

Authors for whom English is not their native language may inadvertently commit plagiarism, Dr. Shafer observed. “I am very sympathetic to the challenges faced by investigators struggling to write a scientific paper in an unfamiliar language. However, I have no choice but to retract papers that contain plagiarized text, even if it is only a single paragraph, and even if the intent was simply to express an idea in proper scientific English,” he said.

The U.K. journal Anaesthesia has been using CrossCheck to screen every manuscript it receives, according to Steven M. Yentis, MD, editor-in-chief of the publication. In a recent editorial, Dr. Yentis said his journal publication rejected 4% of submitted manuscripts in 2010 because the software turned up evidence of plagiarism.

For example, how common are retractions from the anesthesia literature? Dr. Yentis looked at this question last June, and came up with the following numbers: 26 from the eight leading titles in the specialty dating back to 1993. Of those, 16 (62%) involved papers on which Dr. Reuben was a co-author.

The tally does not include the retraction in the December issue of A&A of an article by German researcher Joachim Boldt, MD, PhD, and colleagues. It does, however, include a retraction in Anaesthesia—evidently the first yet by the title—of a paper on the safety of cardiac surgery without transfusions in Jehovah’s Witnesses.

According to the retraction notice, “the study did not have ethical approval as claimed. In addition, the article was written and submitted without the knowledge or consent” of three of the four authors, who agreed to the retraction. “It has not been possible,” the notice concludes, “to obtain a response from the corresponding author”—who, to add insult to the injury of forgery, evidently misspelled the surname of one of his unwitting collaborators.

Recently, an Internet forum for medical editors was buzzing with complaints about author misconduct.

“The kinds of crimes I have seen over the years are at best belief defying,” wrote Udo Schuklenk, PhD, professor of philosophy at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and co-editor-in-chief of the journals Bioethics and Developing World Bioethics. “My all-time favorite, by a long stretch, was the medical journal deputy editor who plagiarized a whole piece we had published in his medical journal (a paper on medical ethics, appreciate the irony of it all). We duly contacted his editor-in-chief as well as the journal’s editorial board. After extended umming and aahhing we were told that a correction (!) would be published, and that—given the deputy editor’s seniority, experience and professional standing—they had accepted the ‘honest mistake’ explanation of their plagiarizing medical ethics expert.”

By the way, A&A retracted another article in the December issue, but it doesn’t involve plagiarism, at least not from someone else’s text. In this case, the authors republished a paper they had previously published in German.

Retraction Watch is watching you

2011-01-04T20:50:00.003+02:00

Charles Day

Big, scandalous cases of scientific fraud are widely covered in the popular press. In the early 2000s Jan Hendrik Schön of Bell Labs published 21 papers about organic semiconductors: seven in Nature, six in Physical Review Letters, and eight in Science. All of them were withdrawn when it turned out that Schön had faked the results.
Schön's notoriety was so great that he became the subject not only of news reports, but also of books and even a BBC TV documentary, "The Dark Secret of Hendrik Schön."
Trends in scientific fraud also make the news, although not as often. Last September a report in Nature about a move to kill off China's weakest scientific journals began as follows:
Few Chinese scientists would be surprised to hear that many of the country's scientific journals are filled with incremental work, read by virtually no one and riddled with plagiarism. But the Chinese government's solution to this problem came as a surprise last week.
Low-key, "routine" cases of scientific fraud don't appear to be newsworthy. Like shoplifting, vandalism, disorderly conduct, and other misdemeanors, such cases are deemed of local, not national, interest. News of a plagiarized paragraph in a chemistry paper, say, might appear on a chemistry blog; less likely in the New York Times.
But a steady background of petty fraud harms the integrity of science more than sporadic spectacular outrages. A Schön or a Viktor Ninov, who faked evidence of a newly discovered superheavy element, can be excused as a pathological outlier. Widespread fraud suggests something intrinsically wrong with the science establishment.
So I was relieved to hear from Marty Hanna, a Physics Today copy editor, about Retraction Watch. Founded by Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, the blog strives to publicize every fraud-prompted retraction that occurs in the scientific literature.
Marcus and Oransky aren't the only watchdogs. Academic publishers, both nonprofit and for-profit, are collaborating to implement a software tool, CrossCheck, that screens for plagiarism when a paper is submitted.
Ideally, scientists shouldn't cheat. Realistically, some scientists, under pressure to succeed, will always succumb to temptation and commit fraud. When they do so, and when the watchdogs catch them, I hope they feel guilty and ashamed. That reaction would mean that efforts of the American Physical Society and others to instill ethical behavior are working.

U.S. Scientists Top Research-Fraud List -- How Concerned Should We Be?

2011-01-01T21:33:00.000+02:00

A recent paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics showing that American scientists are responsible for most cases of scientific retractions and fraud is causing a stir.
The paper's author, Dr. R. Grant Steen, searched PubMed, a leading science research database, and identified 788 retracted papers from 2000 to 2010. Steen's research found that U.S. scientists were lead authors on 169 of the papers retracted for serious errors, as well as 84 retracted for outright fraud.
China followed the U.S. with 89 total retractions, including 20 due to fraud. Japan was next with 60 retractions (18 for fraud), then India and the U.K.
Steen's conclusion: "American scientists are significantly more prone to engage in data fabrication or falsiﬁcation than scientists from other countries.">>>

Top retractions of 2010 - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

2010-12-17T02:44:00.006+02:00

Jef Akst

Retractions are a scientist's worst nightmare. In the last 10 years, at least 788 scientific papers have been pulled from the literature, according to a study published this year in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Whether it is a result of research misconduct, duplicate publication, or simply sloppy data analysis, a retracted paper can devastate a scientist's research, or even impact a whole scientific field.

Here are 10 of the biggest retraction stories of the last year. >>>

Self-plagiarism case prompts calls for agencies to tighten rules - SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

2010-12-08T06:06:00.005+02:00

Eugenie Samuel Reich - Nature 468, 745 (2010)

Is plagiarism a sin if the duplicated material is one's own? Self-plagiarism may seem a smaller infraction than stealing another author's work, but the practice is under increasing scrutiny, as the eruption two weeks ago of a long-standing controversy at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, makes clear.

Colleagues of Reginald Smith, an emeritus professor of mechanical and materials engineering at Queen's, say that up to 20 of Smith's papers contain material copied without acknowledgment from previous publications. University officials first learned of the duplications in 2005, and they eventually led to an investigation by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), which funded some of Smith's work, including experiments on board the U.S. space shuttles. Although Smith avoided censure for research misconduct, three papers were subsequently retracted by the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences and one by the Journal of Materials Processing Technology. The situation was recently made public in news reports and has led to calls for stronger powers by funding agencies in Canada to discipline researchers who engage in the practice.

"He was a very good scientist, but something happened and he got into this business of duplicating papers," says Chris Pickles, a metallurgist at Queen's who raised concerns about Smith's publication practices after spotting some duplications under Smith's name while searching an online database. Smith referred a request for comment to his lawyer, Ken Clark of law firm Aird and Berlis in Toronto, Canada, who notes that many of the republications duplicated material from conference proceedings, which in an earlier epoch would not usually have been published. He also notes that Smith is retired, and does not stand to gain financially from his republications.

Many researchers say that republication without citation violates the premise that each scientific paper should be an original contribution. It can also serve to falsely inflate a researcher's CV by suggesting a higher level of productivity. And although the repetition of the methods section of a paper is not necessarily considered inappropriate by the scientific community, "we would expect that results, discussion and the abstract present novel results," says Harold Garner, a bioinformatician at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. Garner's research group used an automated software tool to check the biomedical literature for duplicated text, and identified more than 79,000 pairs of article abstracts and titles containing duplicated wording. He says work on the database of partly duplicated articles--called Déjà vu--has led to close to 100 retractions by journal editors who found the reuse improper. An analysis by Garner in the press at Urologic Oncology shows that while the total quantity of biomedical literature has risen steadily since 2000, cases of republication stopped rising after 2003 and fell sharply between 2006 and 2008 (see graph). "It actually does look like it's getting better," says Garner. "People who would ordinarily step across the line are not doing it."

He credits increased vigilance by journal editors who are using his free tool or commercially available software to check submissions for repeated text and halt dubious papers before they reach publication.

NSERC's policy on integrity in research makes no specific reference to plagiarism or self-plagiarism, which has led to calls for tougher rules in the wake of the publicity over Smith's case. In the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) takes a strong stance on plagiarism in general, says Christine Boesz, who was inspector-general at the NSF from 1999 until 2008. "The NSF got into the plagiarism game early," she says. Numbers obtained by Nature under the US Freedom of Information Act show that, since 2007, the agency has found between 5 and 13 cases of plagiarism each year. In contrast, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services's Office of Research Integrity (ORI), which is responsible for overseeing alleged plagiarism associated with National Institutes of Health research, has reported no cases of plagiarism of text over the past three years, but has found up to 14 scientists a year guilty of falsification or fabrication of data (see Table 1).

Ann Bradley, a spokeswoman for the ORI, says the office's working definition of plagiarism excludes minor cases. Nick Steneck, director of research ethics and integrity at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, says authorities worldwide should adopt a uniform misconduct policy that provides clear guidance not only on data falsification and fabrication but also on lesser ethical breaches--such as self-plagiarism.

Sultans of swap: Turkish researchers plagiarized electromagnetic fields-cancer paper, apparently others

2010-11-30T18:07:00.003+02:00

The Bosnian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences has retracted a paper it published in August by Turkish researchers on the potential cancer risks associated with exposure to electromagnetic fields, or EMFs.

The reason: Other people wrote nearly all of it. >>>

Plagiarists plagiarized: A daisy chain of retractions at Anesthesia & Analgesia

2010-11-24T23:33:00.008+02:00

Adam Marcus

If a plagiarist plagiarizes from an author who herself has plagiarized, do we call it a wash and go for a beer?
That scenario is precisely what Steven L. Shafer, MD, found himself facing recently. Dr. Shafer, editor-in-chief of Anesthesia & Analgesia (A&A), learned that authors of a 2008 case report in his publication had lifted two-and-a-half paragraphs of text from a 2004 paper published in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia.
A contrite retraction letter, which appears in the December issue of A&A, from the lead author, Sushma Bhatnagar, MD, of New Delhi, India, called the plagiarism “unintended” and apologized for the incident. Straightforward enough.
But then things get sticky. Amazingly, the December issue of A&A also retracts a 2010 manuscript by Turkish researchers who, according to Dr. Shafer, plagiarized from at least five other published papers—one of which happens to have been a 2008 article by Dr. Bhatnagar in the Journal of Palliative Medicine.
“Dr. Bhatnagar’s paper in Anesthesia & Analgesia was retracted because it contained text taken from a paper by Dr. Munir,” Dr. Shafer told Anesthesiology News. “However, Dr. Bhatnagar’s paper in the Journal of Palliative Medicine is one of the source journals for the plagiarism by Dr. Memiş. To give you an idea how widespread this is, we recently rejected a paper that copied large blocks for text from a paper by Dr. Memiş.”>>>

A painful remedy - NATURE

2010-11-04T10:20:00.004+02:00

EDITORIAL

Nature, Volume:468, Page:6, doi:10.1038/468006b

Published online 03 November 2010

The number of papers being retracted is on the rise, for reasons that are not all bad.

Few experiences can be more painful to a researcher than having to retract a research paper. Some papers die quietly, such as when other scientists find that the work cannot be replicated and simply ignore it. Yet, as highlighted by several episodes in recent years, the most excruciating revelation must be to find not only that a paper is wrong, but that it is the result of fraud or fabrication, which itself requires months or years of investigation. Where once the research seemed something to be exceptionally proud of, the damage caused by fraudulent work can spread much wider, as discovered by associates of the Austrian physicist Jan Hendrick Schön and the South Korean stem-cell biologist Woo Suk Hwang. But whatever the reason for a retraction, all of the parties involved — journals included — need to face up to it promptly.

This year, Nature has published four retractions, an unusually large number. In 2009 we published one. Throughout the past decade, we have averaged about two per year, compared with about one per year in the 1990s, excluding the pulse of retractions of papers co-authored by Schön.

Given that Nature publishes about 800 papers a year, the total is not particularly alarming, especially because only some of the retractions are due to proven misconduct. A few of the Nature research journals have also had to retract papers in recent years, but the combined data do no more than hint at a trend. A broader survey revealed even smaller proportions: in 2009, Times Higher Education commissioned a survey by Thomson Reuters that counted 95 retractions among 1.4 million papers published in 2008. But the same survey showed that, since 1990 — during which time the number of published papers doubled — the proportion of retractions increased tenfold (see http://go.nature.com/vphd17).

So why the increase? More awareness of misconduct by journals and the community, an increased ability to create and to detect unduly manipulated images, and greater willingness by journals to publish retractions must account for some of this rise. One can also speculate about the increasing difficulty for senior researchers of keeping track of the detail of what is happening in their labs. This is of concern not just because of the rare instances of misconduct, but also because of the risk of sloppiness and of errors not being caught. Any lab with more than ten researchers may need to take special measures if a principal investigator is to be able to assure the quality of junior members' work.

The need for quality assurance and the difficulties of doing it are exacerbated when new techniques are rapidly taken up within what is often a highly competitive community. And past episodes have shown the risk that collaborating scientists — especially those who are geographically distant — may fail to check data from other labs for which, as co-authors, they are ultimately responsible.

If we at Nature are alerted to possibly false results by somebody who was not an author of the original paper, we will investigate. This is true even if the allegations are anonymous — some important retractions in the literature have arisen from anonymous whistle-blowing. However, we are well aware of the great damage that can be done to co-authors as a result of such allegations, especially when the claims turn out to be false. Such was the case with a recent e-mail alert widely distributed by a group calling itself Stem Cell Watch (see Nature 467, 1020; 2010) — an action that we deplore.

For our part, we are sensitive to such concerns and will bear in mind the need to protect the interests of authors until our obligation to the community at large becomes clear. But then we will publish a retraction promptly, and link to it prominently from the original papers. We will also list the retraction on our press release if the original paper was itself highlighted to the media.

Ultimately, it comes down to the researchers — those most affected by the acts — to remain observant and diligent in pursuing their concerns wherever they lead, and where necessary, to correct the literature promptly. Too often, such conscientious behaviour is not rewarded as it should be.

Plagiarism and self-plagiarism: What every author should know

2010-10-30T09:27:00.011+03:00

Biochemia Medica 2010;20(3):295-300.

Miguel Roig

The scientific community is greatly concerned about the problem of plagiarism and self-plagiarism. In this paper I explore these two transgressions and their various manifestations with a focus on the challenges faced by authors with limited English proficiency.

Introduction

Evidence indicates that plagiarism amongst biomedical students is fairly common (1-3). Because the offenses in question usually involve academic assignments, they are typically classified as instances of academic dishonesty. Such transgressions can result in negative consequences for the student and these can range from failure for the assignment to expulsion from the university. When plagiarism occurs in the context of conducting scientific research, whether perpetrated by students or by professionals, it rises to the level of scientific misconduct; a much more serious crime.

Regrettably, a general consensus is now emerging that plagiarism in the biomedical sciences has become a matter of great concern. Consider the evidence, when searching the PubMed database for articles on plagiarism (4), the database yields over 700 entries (as of this writing) with more than half of them representing articles that were published within the last decade. Also, journals are increasingly expanding their instructions to authors to include guidelines on plagiarism and related matters of authorship. Yet, perhaps the most alarming development has been the availability of text similarity software, such as eTBLAST, that allows users to search for plagiarism in journal articles (5). Given these developments, it is not surprising that a recently published survey shows plagiarism as one of the areas of greatest concern for biomedical journal editors (6).

The causes underlying many cases of plagiarism are believed to be the same as those associated with the other two major forms of scientific misconduct, fabrication and falsification. For example, one major factor believed to operate is the pressure to publish. The reality is that for many working scientists, the number of published papers authored continues to be one of the primary means by which research productivity is measured. Moreover, the quality of a publication is another important factor that comes into play, for the most desirable outcome is for papers to appear in the so-called high-impact journals. Of course, carrying out scientific research can be very rewarding intrinsically and the joy we experience when we are engaged in this noble process is probably the very reason why many of us chose science as a career. However, as we all know, good science requires a lot of patience, hard work, and a good dose of creative, methodological skill. In addition, scientific research has become very costly in terms of human and laboratory resources. Our tenacity and dedication will usually pay off, as when we are able to obtain data that verifies our hypotheses. But as every scientist knows, such a happy ending does not always occur. For example, what at first might look like a promising avenue of investigation can sometimes end up being a dead-end. In a worst case scenario, months of toiling in the laboratory may only yield a limited payout as when results turn out marginal or null and, therefore, not likely to be publishable. Or perhaps a subtle mistake early in the experiment can render as useless months of otherwise meticulous laboratory work. These are some of the many scenarios that are thought to lead otherwise well-meaning scientists to tamper with their data.

Because plagiarism and self-plagiarism are thought to be far more common than fabrication and falsification, it is important to explore these transgressions in some detail. The reader should note that these offenses can sometimes have legal implications, as when they violate copyright law. However, because these cases rarely, if ever, reach the legal stage when they involve scholarly journals, I will confine my treatment of these malpractices within the ethical domain rather than within the legal one. My hope is that, by raising the readers’ awareness of these offenses, their occurrence can be prevented.

Plagiarism

Writing journal articles is seldom an easy task and many of us do not exactly enjoy this part of the scientific process. To make matters worse, we often operate with the expectation that our manuscript will be returned with a myriad of criticisms and suggestions for improvement that are sometimes viewed by us as arbitrary and capricious. Although this feedback almost always results in an improved product, I suspect that most authors dread this aspect of the process and few of them genuinely welcome such efforts. In the end, however, most of us recognize that the peer review system is an integral part of the cycle of science.

Good writing is seldom easy to produce and effective scientific prose can take time and much mental effort to generate even for experienced authors. Thus, the temptation to look for short-cuts can arise particularly if the author is experiencing some form of ‘writers’ block’, a temporary inability to become inspired and produce new work. In these situations, the urge to ‘borrow’ others’ well-crafted prose may be irresistible. But, one might ask, what is the harm in such borrowing? After all, taking a couple of lines of text does not, in any way, affect the integrity of the data and it is the latter that is most important (7). Besides as an ethical offense in the sciences, plagiarism of text is arguably far less serious than plagiarism of ideas or plagiarism of data (8). Moreover, since there is no universally agreed-upon operational definition of plagiarism in terms of how many consecutive words can be copied without attribution, who is to say that it is wrong to appropriate a well-written sentence or two that elegantly conveys a very complex process or phenomenon? Other considerations seem to even favor such minor ‘borrowing’. For example, when describing a highly technical methodology and/or procedure commonly used by our peers, there is some risk that even a small change in the wording could result in subtle misinterpretations of the methods or procedure and that possibility is highly undesirable (9). Of course, the latter rationale is a poor excuse for the copy-pasting of large segments of methodology sections. Besides, in the quest for conciseness, these sections sometimes lack some important details and, therefore, can often benefit from rewriting for purposes of enhancing their clarity (10). Unfortunately, there are those, whose writing style is such that they take a liberal approach to using others’ text as their own (11). But, in the current climate of responsible research conduct, such writing practices now run a greater risk of being noticed and, at best, they will be judged with suspicion, for they certainly do not represent high standards of scholarship.

It is totally understandable when the main reason given for using others’ text is lack of language/writing proficiency (12). However, as much as we can empathize with such authors, the scientific community could not function properly with different scholarship criteria depending on one’s level of language proficiency (10). The reality of the situation is that English has become the lingua franca of science and most, if not all, of the high impact factor journals are published in English. Even some of the journals published in non English-speaking nations are published in English, i.e., Biochemia Medica, and the expectation is for scientists from these nations to also publish in English. This situation presents a unique challenge for the Limited English Proficiency (LEP) author, but even some of these authors recognize that it is a challenge that must be met (13). English is not an easy language to learn, especially for those whose native language is based on a different alphabet system. Moreover, while good skills in English are necessary for writing journal articles, they are not sufficient to do the job. To write effective scientific prose, not only do we need to be proficient in the language, we also need to have a thorough grasp of the technical language and the unique expressions and phraseology associated with the particular knowledge domain in question. In other words, we need to be able to understand what we are reading and also to convey that information using our own words and domain-consistent expressions; our own ‘voice’. In fact, evidence that I have collected in the past suggests that text readability is a strong predictor of misappropriation not only by students (14) but also by professors (15). Novice researchers and especially LEP authors will often encounter these types of reading/writing difficulties when dealing with unfamiliar technical literature in their disciplines. Therefore, I strongly believe that these are the very factors that are behind a significant amount of plagiarism.

Does ‘borrowing’ a few sentences here and there (i.e., patchwriting) rise to the level of plagiarism? I suppose that it depends on the circumstances, the number of sentences that have been misappropriated and on who is doing the judging. However, the fact remains that passing as one’s own the work of others, even if it is a small amount, is consistent with any definition of plagiarism. In addition, such practices are now more likely to be discovered given the availability of software programs designed to detect plagiarism. For example, consider the recent case in which a paper was retracted from a journal because merely two paragraphs from its introduction were found to be identical to paragraphs appearing in an earlier published paper by a different author (16). The message is clear: Using textual material without proper attribution is plagiarism, even when it is done in relatively small amounts.

Self-plagiarism

Whereas plagiarism involves the presentation of others’ ideas, text, data, images, etc., as the products of our own creation, self-plagiarism, occurs when we decide to reuse in whole or in part our own previously disseminated ideas, text, data, etc without any indication of their prior dissemination. Perhaps the most commonly-known form of self-plagiarism is duplicate publication, but other forms exist and include redundant publication, augmented publication, also known as meat extender, and segmented publication, also known as salami, piecemeal, or fragmented publication. The key feature in all forms of self-plagiarism is the presence of significant overlap between publications and, most importantly, the absence of a clear indication as to the relationship between the various duplicates or related papers. Because of the latter, the word ‘covert’ should always be added to these designations (e.g., covert duplicate publication, covert redundant publication, etc.). As with traditional forms of plagiarism, a very likely cause of much self-plagiarism appears to be authors’ desire to add publications to their vita (17).

In a typical duplicate publication, authors of a previously published paper submit roughly the same manuscript to a different journal. The second submission may have a slightly different title, a different order of authorship, perhaps minor changes to the text of the manuscript, but the data and statistical analyses are largely the same. These instances of duplication are typically easy to spot because the identical text, formatting, data tables, etc., are usually recognized by the astute reader who is familiar with that specific area of research. A more harmful version of duplicate publication occurs when the authors make an effort to conceal the fact that the same data are being republished more than once. In these cases the perpetrator makes a concerted effort to make significant textual changes to various components of the paper, such as the literature review, discussion, etc., and they may do so by, for example, adding and/or deleting certain references. Furthermore, the formatting of tables of data and of graphs may also be changed, thus giving the appearance of a different set of data and a distinct paper. Again, the key component of this malpractice is that the new paper makes no reference to the previous publication, or if it cites the previous paper, it does so in such an ambiguous manner that the reader fails to recognize the exact relationship between the two papers, thus the term covert duplicate.

There can be various other permutations of this basic approach and von Elm and his colleagues have described a number of them (18). In one version, for example, authors of a previously published paper may reuse its data and carry out a different set of statistical analyses. The results of these analyses are then included in a paper whose title, abstract and portions of the introduction and discussion may now be somewhat different in the context of these new analyses. In another version, data from two or more previously published papers are presented together as new with perhaps additional statistical analyses included. In instances of augmented publication, or meat extender as this type of redundancy is sometimes called, authors simply add additional observations or data points to a previously published data set. They then reanalyze the augmented data set, and publish a paper based on the new results. Again, it is important to emphasize that such practices may be acceptable if the author provides the editor with a defensible rationale for his actions and makes it clear to the reader that the data are derived, in whole or in part, from a previous publication. However, because most journals only accept original research, such a clarification often renders the paper unsuitable for publication. Again, because publication of the new paper is the primary aim for the unscrupulous author, this fact tends to remains hidden from the editor and the reader.

Segmented or salami publication is a distinct publication practice that may, in theory, contain little if any self-plagiarized text and/or data. However, even in the absence of any text or data reuse, the practice is nevertheless, problematic and actively discouraged in the sciences. A typical case involves a complex experiment/study (i.e., the whole salami) that yields multiple measures or sets of measures from the same study sample. Rather than publishing the results of these various data sets together in a single publication, the investigators analyze and publish each data set separately (i.e., salami slices). In this way the single experiment can yield two or more articles thereby enhancing the investigators’ publication list. As in other forms of covert redundancy and covert duplication, this practice is considered unethical if each salami slice (i.e., segmented publication) fails to reveal the fact that its data are derived from the same experiment as data from other related publications that were part of the same salami.

There can be legitimate reasons for the various forms of redundancy. For example, with respect to salami publication, it is not uncommon in longitudinal-type studies, such as the Framingham Heart study (19), for different sets of authors to publish observations from the same longitudinal sample in separate journal articles. This is completely acceptable and even desirable when the interval of time between observations made from the sample spans years. Likewise, for other types of experiments there may be good reasons to report different results arising from a single experiment in two or three different journals as the various observations may be of interest to different audiences. However, authors must always inform readers about the exact origin their data and how their data are related to other published papers. Even duplicate publications may be totally acceptable as when a paper first appears in one language and it is then translated into another language and published in a different journal or edited volume. But, again, the second publication must always provide a clear indication as to its association with the earlier published version.

The major scientific organizations (e.g., Committee on Publication Ethics, World Association of Medical Editors) and even individual journals offer relevant guidelines to avert instances of self-plagiarism. For example, the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals” (20) published by The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors calls on authors to inform the editor of the journal, upon submission of a manuscript, to reveal other related published papers or manuscripts that have been prepared for other journals.

Obviously the primary issue in self-plagiarism (i.e., duplicate, redundant publication, and augmented publication) concerns the covert reuse of already published data that are being portrayed as new data. In the case of salami publication the main concern is the presentation of data sets that are portrayed as having been independently derived when in fact they come from a study from which other related data were collected. The problem with such misleading portrayals of data is that they are likely to mislead others by overestimating, or depending on the type of problem being addressed, underestimating a particular effect or process. For example, let’s assume that there exist various covert duplicates that show a certain drug to be highly effective as a cure for a disease. Someone conducting a meta-analysis on the efficacy of the drug may be unaware that some of the studies found are actually cleverly disguised covert duplicates of existing ones. The inclusion of these duplicates results in an inflated effect size, which in turn distorts researchers’ understanding of the true effectiveness of the drug (21).

One last form of self-plagiarism that must be discussed, and one that I believe to be most strongly related to language proficiency is what some refer as same-authored text recycling. A typical instance of this practice occurs when authors reuse large portions of text that they have already published in one or more journal articles and these are then reused in a new publication (9,22). For the native speaker/writer, the practice represents, at best, a case of intellectual laziness (23) or poor scholarly etiquette and is certainly discouraged by some journals (24). Text recycling, when practiced out of necessity by LEP authors, certainly does not merit such negative characterizations. However, it is still deemed as a problematic practice.

Why should we be discouraged from reusing textual material that we ourselves have produced? Here are some reasons. I believe that there is an underlying assumption on the part of the author who is engaged in these practices, that the previously written material is so well crafted and clear that it cannot benefit from improvement (10,25). In my experience as a reader of primary literature and as a journal reviewer, I often find that assumption to be totally unwarranted. In addition, merely relying on copy-pasting to create a methodology section runs the risk of failing to include or exclude crucial details unique to the new experiment being described. There is at least one editor that cautions potential authors against the mere recycling of previously published methods sections without modification (26) and already one study has uncovered evidence of important lapses when using copy-pasting techniques with medical records (27). Thus, relying on mere copying and pasting of text can be highly problematic when used in scientific articles. Equally important perhaps, is the fact that text recycling does not constitute scholarly excellence, for it violates a basic assumption of the implicit reader-writer contract. Accordingly, the reader operates under the assumption that 1) the author/s is the individual who produced the work, 2) any text, ideas, etc., that are taken from other available sources, even if produced by the same author, are identified with standard scholarly conventions, such as citations and quotations, and 3) that the ideas, data, etc. presented are accurate (28).

In sum, plagiarism and self-plagiarism can manifest themselves in a variety of forms. Depending on the circumstances, these transgressions can merit labels that range from poor or sloppy scholarship to scientific misconduct. Some LEP authors may be particularly vulnerable to excessive ‘borrowing’ from others’ work as well as from their own previously published papers. While their situation is totally understandable they should keep in mind that most of us in the scientific community regard science as highest form of scholarship. As such, we expect nothing but the highest standards of practice from those who are given the privilege of engaging is this most noble of activities.

References:

1. Ryan G, Bonanno H, Krass I, Scouller K, Smith L. Undergraduate and postgraduate pharmacy students’ perceptions of plagiarism and academic honesty. Am J Pharm Educ 2009;73:105.

2. Rennie SC, Crosby JR. Are “tomorrow’s doctors” honest? Questionnaire study exploring medical students’ attitudes and reported behaviour on academic misconduct. BMJ 2001;322:274-5.

3. Billić-Zulle L, Frković V, Turk T, Petrovečki M. Prevalence of plagiarism among Medical students. Croat Med J 2005;46:126-31.

4. Aronson JK. Plagiarism - please don’t copy. Br J Clin Pharmacol 2007;64:403-5.

5. Errami M, Garner H. A tale of two citations. Nature 2008;451:397-99.

6. Wager E, Fiack S, Graf C, Robinson A, Rowlands I. J Med Ethics 2009;35:348-53.

7. Yilmaz I. Plagiarism? No, we’re just borrowing better English. Nature 2007;449:658.

8. Bouville M. Plagiarism: words and ideas. Sci Eng Ethics 2008;14:311-22.

9. Roig M. Re-using text from one’s own previously published papers: an exploratory study of potential self-plagiarism. Psychol Rep 2005;97:43-9.

10. Roig M. Plagiarism: Consider the context (letter to the editor). Science 2009;325:813-4.

11. Julliard K. Perceptions of plagiarism in the use of other author’s language. Fam Med 1994;26:356-60.

12. Vasconcelos S, Leta J, Costa L, Pinto A, Sorenson MM. Discussing plagiarism in Latin American science. EMBO reports 2009;10:677-82.

13. Afifi A. Plagiarism is not fair play. Lancet 2007;369:1428.

14. Roig M. When college students’ attempts at paraphrasing become instances of potential plagiarism. Psychol Rep 1999;84:973-82.

15. Roig M. Plagiarism and paraphrasing criteria of college and university professors. Ethics Behav 2001;11:307-23.

16. Science Insider. From the Science Policy Blog. Science 2009;325:527.

17. Yank V, Barnes D. Consensus and contention regarding redundant publications in clinical research: cross-sectional survey of editors and authors. J Med Ethics 2003;29:109-14.

18. von Elm E, Poglia G, Walder B, Tramér M R. Different patterns of duplicate publication: An analysis of articles used in systematic reviews. JAMA 2004;291:974-80.

19. Framingham Heart Study. Available at: http://www.framinghamheartstudy.org/. Accessed April 2nd 2010.

20. Redundant publication. Uniform Requirements For Manuscripts Submitted To Biomedical Journals: Writing and Editing For Biomedical Publication. Updated October 2007. Available at: http://www.icmje.org/. Accessed March 6th 2010.

21. Tramèr M, Reynolds DJM, Moore RA, McQuay HJ. Impact of covert duplicate publication on meta-analysis: a case study. BMJ 1997;315:635-40.

22. Bretag T, Carapiet S. A Preliminary Study to Identify the Extent of Self-Plagiarism in Australian Academic Research [Electronic version]. Plagiary 2007:2;92-103. Accessed January 5th, 2010, from http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.5240451.0002.010.

23. Editorial. Self-plagiarism: unintentional, harmless of fraud? Lancet 2009;374:664.

24. Griffin GC. Don’t plagiarize - even yourself! Postgrad Med 1991;89:15-6.

25. Roig M. The debate on self-plagiarism: inquisitional science or high standards of scholarship. J Cogn Behav Psychoter 2008;8:245-58.

26. Biros MH. Advice to Authors: Getting Published in Academic Emergency Medicine. Available at: http://www.saem.org/inform/aempub.htm. Accessed March 6th 2003.

27. Hammond KW, Helbig ST, Benson CC, Brathwaite-Sketoe BM. Are electronic records trustworthy? Observations on copying, pasting and duplication. AMIA Annu Symp Proc 2003:269-73.

28. Roig M. Avoiding plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical writing (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Research Integrity). Available at: http://ori.hhs.gov/education/products/plagiarism/. Accessed January 5th 2010.

Rampant Fraud Threat to China’s Brisk Ascent - The New York Times

2010-10-08T17:15:00.001+03:00

By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — No one disputes Zhang Wuben’s talents as a salesman. Through television shows, DVDs and a best-selling book, he convinced millions of people that raw eggplant and immense quantities of mung beans could cure lupus, diabetes, depression and cancer.

For $450, seriously ill patients could buy a 10-minute consultation and a prescription — except Mr. Zhang, one of the most popular practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, was booked through 2012.

But when the price of mung beans skyrocketed this spring, Chinese journalists began digging deeper. They learned that contrary to his claims, Mr. Zhang, 47, was not from a long line of doctors (his father was a weaver). Nor did he earn a degree from Beijing Medical University (his only formal education, it turned out, was the brief correspondence course he took after losing his job at a textile mill).

The exposure of Mr. Zhang’s faked credentials provoked a fresh round of hand-wringing over what many scholars and Chinese complain are the dishonest practices that permeate society, including students who cheat on college entrance exams, scholars who promote fake or unoriginal research, and dairy companies that sell poisoned milk to infants.

The most recent string of revelations has been bracing. After a plane crash in August killed 42 people in northeast China, officials discovered that 100 pilots who worked for the airline’s parent company had falsified their flying histories. Then there was the padded résumé of Tang Jun, the millionaire former head of Microsoft China and something of a national hero, who falsely claimed to have received a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology.

Few countries are immune to high-profile frauds. Illegal doping in sports and malfeasance on Wall Street are running scandals in the United States. But in China, fakery in one area in particular — education and scientific research — is pervasive enough that many here worry it could make it harder for the country to climb the next rung on the economic ladder.

A Lack of Integrity

China devotes significant resources to building a world-class education system and pioneering research in competitive industries and sciences, and has had notable successes in network computing, clean energy, and military technology. But a lack of integrity among researchers is hindering China’s potential and harming collaboration between Chinese scholars and their international counterparts, scholars in China and abroad say.

“If we don’t change our ways, we will be excluded from the global academic community,” said Zhang Ming, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. “We need to focus on seeking truth, not serving the agenda of some bureaucrat or satisfying the desire for personal profit.”

Pressure on scholars by administrators of state-run universities to earn journal citations — a measure of innovation — has produced a deluge of plagiarized or fabricated research. In December, a British journal that specializes in crystal formations announced that it was withdrawing more than 70 papers by Chinese authors whose research was of questionable originality or rigor.

In an editorial published earlier this year, The Lancet, the British medical journal, warned that faked or plagiarized research posed a threat to President Hu Jintao’s vow to make China a “research superpower” by 2020.

“Clearly, China’s government needs to take this episode as a cue to reinvigorate standards for teaching research ethics and for the conduct of the research itself,” the editorial said. Last month a collection of scientific journals published by Zhejiang University in Hangzhou reignited the firestorm by publicizing results from a 20-month experiment with software that detects plagiarism. The software, called CrossCheck, rejected nearly a third of all submissions on suspicion that the content was pirated from previously published research. In some cases, more than 80 percent of a paper’s content was deemed unoriginal.

The journals’ editor, Zhang Yuehong, emphasized that not all the flawed papers originated in China, although she declined to reveal the breakdown of submissions. “Some were from South Korea, India and Iran,” she said.

The journals, which specialize in medicine, physics, engineering and computer science, were the first in China to use the software. For the moment they are the only ones to do so, Ms. Zhang said.

Plagiarism and Fakery

Her findings are not surprising if one considers the results of a recent government study in which a third of the 6,000 scientists at six of the nation’s top institutions admitted they had engaged in plagiarism or the outright fabrication of research data. In another study of 32,000 scientists last summer by the China Association for Science and Technology, more than 55 percent said they knew someone guilty of academic fraud.

Fang Shimin, a muckraking writer who has become a well-known advocate for academic integrity, said the problem started with the state-run university system, where politically appointed bureaucrats have little expertise in the fields they oversee. Because competition for grants, housing perks and career advancement is so intense, officials base their decisions on the number of papers published.

“Even fake papers count because nobody actually reads them,” said Mr. Fang, who is more widely known by his pen name, Fang Zhouzi, and whose Web site, New Threads, has exposed more than 900 instances of fakery, some involving university presidents and nationally lionized researchers.

When plagiarism is exposed, colleagues and school leaders often close ranks around the accused. Mr. Fang said this was partly because preserving relationships trumped protecting the reputation of the institution. But the other reason, he said, is more sobering: Few academics are clean enough to point a finger at others. One result is that plagiarizers often go unpunished, which only encourages more of it, said Zeng Guoping, director of the Institute of Science Technology and Society at Tsinghua University in Beijing, which helped run the survey of 6,000 academics.

He cited the case of Chen Jin, a computer scientist who was once celebrated for having invented a sophisticated microprocessor but who, it turned out, had taken a chip made by Motorola, scratched out its name, and claimed it as his own. After Mr. Chen was showered with government largess and accolades, the exposure in 2006 was an embarrassment for the scientific establishment that backed him.

But even though Mr. Chen lost his university post, he was never prosecuted. “When people see the accused still driving their flashy cars, it sends the wrong message,” Mr. Zeng said.

The problem is not confined to the realm of science. In fact many educators say the culture of cheating takes root in high school, where the competition for slots in the country’s best colleges is unrelenting and high marks on standardized tests are the most important criterion for admission. Ghost-written essays and test questions can be bought. So, too, can a “hired gun” test taker who will assume the student’s identity for the grueling two-day college entrance exam.

Then there are the gadgets — wristwatches and pens embedded with tiny cameras — that transmit signals to collaborators on the outside who then relay back the correct answers. Even if such products are illegal, students spent $150 million last year on Internet essays and high-tech subterfuge, a fivefold increase over 2007, according to a Wuhan University study, which identified 800 Web sites offering such illicit services.

Academic deceit is not limited to high school students. In July, Centenary College, a New Jersey institution with satellite branches in China and Taiwan, shuttered its business schools in Shanghai, Beijing and Taipei after finding rampant cheating among students. Although school administrators declined to discuss the nature of the misconduct, it was serious enough to withhold degrees from each of the programs’ 400 students. Given a chance to receive their M.B.A.’s by taking another exam, all but two declined, school officials said.

Nonchalant Cheating

Ask any Chinese student about academic skullduggery and the response is startlingly nonchalant. Arthur Lu, an engineering student who last spring graduated from Tsinghua University, considered a plum of the country’s college system, said it was common for students to swap test answers or plagiarize essays from one another. “Perhaps it’s a cultural difference but there is nothing bad or embarrassing about it,” said Mr. Lu, who started this semester on a master’s degree at Stanford University. “It’s not that students can’t do the work. They just see it as a way of saving time.”

The Chinese government has vowed to address the problem. Editorials in the state-run press frequently condemn plagiarism and last month, Liu Yandong, a powerful Politburo member who oversees Chinese publications, vowed to close some of the 5,000 academic journals whose sole existence, many scholars say, is to provide an outlet for doctoral students and professors eager to inflate their publishing credentials.

Fang Shimin and another crusading journalist, Fang Xuanchang, have heard the vows and threats before. In 2004 and again in 2006, the Ministry of Education announced antifraud campaigns but the two bodies they established to tackle the problem have yet to mete out any punishments.

In recent years, both journalists have taken on Xiao Chuanguo, a urologist who invented a surgical procedure aimed at restoring bladder function in children with spina bifida, a congenital deformation of the spinal column that can lead to incontinence, and when untreated, kidney failure and death.

In a series of investigative articles and blog postings, the two men uncovered discrepancies in Dr. Xiao’s Web site, including claims that he had published 26 articles in English-language journals (they could only find four) and that he had won an achievement award from the American Urological Association (the award was for an essay he wrote).

But even more troubling, they said, were assertions that his surgery had an 85 percent success rate. Of more than 100 patients interviewed, they said none reported having been cured of incontinence, with nearly 40 percent saying their health had worsened after the procedure, which involved rerouting a leg nerve to the bladder. (In early trials, doctors in the United States who have done the surgery have found the results to be far more promising.)

Wherever the truth may have been, Dr. Xiao was incensed. He filed a string of libel suits against Fang Shimin and told anyone who would listen that revenge would be his.

This summer both men were brutally attacked on the street in Beijing — Fang Xuanchang by thugs with an iron bar and Fang Shimin by two men wielding pepper spray and a hammer.

When the police arrested Dr. Xiao on Sept. 21, he quickly confessed to hiring the men to carry out the attack, according to the police report. His reason, he said, was vengeance for the revelations he blames for blocking his appointment to the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Despite his confession, Dr. Xiao’s employer, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, appeared unwilling to take any action against him. In the statement they released, administrators said they were shocked by news of his arrest but said they would await the outcome of judicial procedures before severing their ties to him.

Li Bibo and Zhang Jing contributed research.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 7, 2010

An earlier version of this article incorrectly named a member of the Politburo. She is Liu Yandong, not Liu Dongdong. An earlier version of this article also gave an incorrect name for a school where Xiao Chuanguo's appointment was blocked. Dr Xiao was blocked from an appointment to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, not the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Opinion: How to prevent fraud - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

2010-10-07T20:21:00.003+03:00

Suresh Radhakrishnan

Thoughts on how to catch scientific misconduct early from a researcher recently convicted of the offense

Misconduct in science is increasing at an alarming rate, and is an issue that needs to be addressed. The constantly evolving technology, the arrival of online-only journals, and other significant scientific developments warrant a reconsideration of the existing procedures in place to prevent fraud and the development of novel verification techniques. Here, I propose four compelling approaches to nip this problem in the bud and limit the repercussions of scientific misconduct.

I: Funding for all ages

The number of PhDs in biology has increased exponentially over the past several years. Concurrently, the average age of principal investigators (PIs) when they obtain their first R01 research grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been rising, likely a result of the fact that all the PIs, regardless of stature, are competing for the same funding source. But established investigators have a clear advantage. Indeed, the NIH has identified this issue, and just last year instituted a policy to give Early Stage Investigators (those applicants within less than 10 years of experience) special consideration during grant review.

Despite this distinct advantage provided to junior PIs, no such effort has been made for mid-stage investigators, who are at a similar disadvantage to more senior researchers. Furthermore, even for junior PIs, I believe the NIH's effort is offset by the dramatic rise in applicants in this pool and the lack of a parallel increase in the total number of R01 grants. This increasingly competitive funding environment can result in undue pressure on less established PIs to publish in high impact journals, which can encourage falsification. A more effective way to counter the inherent unfairness in the funding process might be to divide funding into three groups according to career stage, such that PIs will be competing for funding against other scientists with similar experience levels. Such leveling of the competition could help reduce the pressure on younger PIs to falsify data.

II: Third party data verification

Experimental design, performance and analysis are getting more sophisticated, leading to an increasing pace of scientific discovery. However, those achievements are not matched by advancements in data-verification processes. It takes a long time to conclude a misconduct investigation, which minimizes the roles of agencies such as the Research Integrity Office at individual institutions and the Office of Research Integrity at the NIH. Furthermore, irrevocable damage has been already done before the dawn of a formal investigation.

Invoking an independent agency for data verification during the preliminary stages of a project could aid in generating stronger manuscripts, grant applications, and clinical trials while minimizing the occurrence of research misconduct. I propose that a third party facility, funded by groups such as the NIH, could provide such a service in an efficient and effective manner. Reagents could be submitted to the agency in a blinded fashion, and time spent on this process can be minimized by encouraging simplicity in experimental designs. For more complex experiments, such as those involving special animal models and biophysical studies, laboratories approved by their institutional Research Integrity Office can provide support, either by verifying the data themselves, or hosting a scientist from the central facility.

To ensure the integrity of funded research, funding agencies should insist upon the verification of preliminary data included in the grant to be completed before funding but after positive review. Journals can similarly choose to conditionally accept manuscripts prior to data verification, but withhold publication until the results have been validated.

III: Strong postdoctoral forums

Despite the rise in NIH applicants, the number of postdoctoral organizations has not increased significantly over the past decade. As a result, the supply-to-demand ratio of postdoctoral fellows is skewed against fellows, thereby making them dispensable for a laboratory. This can lead to self-inflicted pressure on the fellows for data delivery to help the lab obtain funding, as well as hesitancy to report any suspected unethical actions of their PIs.

To address these and other issues, National Postdoctoral Association (NPA) was founded in 2003. Despite their strong commitment to the welfare of the fellows, consistently addressing grassroot issues at an institutional level can be a major challenge. Moreover, awareness about NPA among new fellows arriving at an institution is very low. (I discovered NPA's existence just last year, despite having been a fellow for the past decade.) Invoking stronger institutional postdoc associations can directly increase the overall awareness of new fellows about NPA and provide additional support within the institution.

Socialization events hosted by institutional postdoc organizations, for example, can help relieve postdocs of prevailing undue stressors, and promote laboratory discussions, resulting in the prevention of data falsification either by the fellow (by increasing confidence and awareness of ethical science) or by the PI (by creating a whistleblower from an otherwise reluctant fellow). Furthermore, postdoc organizations could play a larger role in mediating cases of misconduct, granting fellows anonymity when they report such an occurrence, and relaying that information to the institutional Research Integrity Office for appropriate measures.

IV: Objective manuscript review

As the success of scientists depends largely on the number of manuscripts they publish, it can be extremely frustrating to have one's journal submissions rejected, particularly when the rejection does not appear to be scientifically justified -- an occurrence that is unfortunately not uncommon with the current peer review system. This, along with the enormous strain on researchers to publish the data rapidly, can potentially lead to compromises in the integrity of their research.

Recently, commendable novel approaches have been adopted by some journals, including revealing the names of the reviewers or blinding the names of the authors, to increase objectivity in scientific publishing (see The Scientist's recent feature for a review). These approaches minimize prejudices while encouraging constructive criticism, which shall serve to increase the quality of the work and reduce the occurrence of research misconduct.

Suresh Radhakrishnan worked at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., as a senior research associate until he was fired for misconduct in May 2010.

Understanding Publication Ethics

2010-10-02T09:23:00.006+03:00

Geraldine S. Pearson*

>>> A recent survey of 524 editors of Wiley-Blackwell science journals (including nursing journals) asked about the severity and frequency of ethical issues, editor confidence in handling these, and awareness of COPE guidelines (Wager, Fiack, Graf, Robinson, & Rowlands, 2009). Nearly half of the queried editors responded to the survey and, interestingly, most believed that misconduct occurred only rarely in their journals. Are editors too trusting in their belief that submissions will be ethical and free of publication misconduct? Is there denial that this issue actually occurs or “never in my journal”? Is it easier to assume that journal submissions will be free of ethical issues? The answers to these questions are unclear. I can share that at the yearly International Academy of Nursing Editors meetings, the issue of ethics and quality in publications is frequently and passionately discussed by attendees. I also know how painful it is to deal with an ethical issue around a journal submission.>>>

*Pearson, G. S. (2010), Understanding Publication Ethics. Perspectives in Psychiatric Care, 46: 253–254. doi: 10.1111/j.1744-6163.2010.00276.x

Singapore Statement Urges Global Consensus on Research Integrity

2010-09-28T10:08:00.000+03:00

Scientists, scientific journals, and research institutions must adhere to an international set of ethical standards and consider the social implications of their work, says a new statement from 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity, co-sponsored by AAAS.

The Singapore Statement on Research Integrity, released 22 September, acknowledges different cultural and national standards for scientific research. But, it concludes “there are also principles and professional responsibilities that are fundamental to the integrity of research wherever it is undertaken.”

The succinct one-page document lists 14 responsibilities for researchers. Individual scientists should share research findings openly and promptly, disclose conflicts of interest, and take responsibility for the “trustworthiness” of their own work, the statement says. Institutions should create policies and work environments that encourage research integrity and institutions and journals should have clear procedures for addressing research misconduct.

The statement also notes four principles that underlie the statement’s responsibilities:

honesty in all aspects of research;
accountability in the conduct of research;
professional courtesy and fairness in working with others; and
good stewardship of research on behalf of others

“The globalization of research requires the globalization of basic understandings of responsible behavior in research,” the members of the Singapore Statement Drafting Committee wrote in a news release accompanying the document. “The Singapore Statement is intended to encourage and further the development of these understandings.”

Policymakers, university leaders, publishers, and government ministers first drafted the statement at the conference, held 21-24 July in Singapore. The conference was supported by science associations from China, Japan, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States. More than 300 delegates from 51 countries contributed to the final statement.

Three officials represented AAAS at the conference: Mark S. Frankel, director of the AAAS Scientific Freedom, Responsibility and Law Program; Gerald Epstein, director of the AAAS Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy; and AAAS Senior Program Associate Deborah Runkle. Frankel and Epstein spoke to the conference about responsible advocacy and the ethics of dual-use research, respectively, while Runkle co-chaired a session on digital plagiarism.

The Singapore attendees sought a set of “international norms and standards related to research integrity that would accommodate national differences,” said Frankel, who helped organize this year’s conference.

The harmonization of these standards is part of a larger commitment by AAAS to support the international integration of scientific values. The effort also has included three years of top-level discussions between the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) and AAAS to coordinate work on scientific ethics.

Seeking an international agreement on research integrity is one way to pursue harmonization, said Epstein. “Although many different groups have different conceptions of what a code of conduct should focus on,” he said, “there isn’t any culture in which making up data is good.”

Frankel added that the Singapore Statement “is a start to what we hope will be a global discussion of the issues raised at the conference and a basis for future national or regional ethics guidelines.”

Becky Ham

22 September 2010

SINGAPORE STATEMENT on RESEARCH INTEGRITY

2010-09-27T21:52:00.008+03:00

Background

The principles and responsibilities set out in the Singapore Statement on Research Integrity represent the first international effort to encourage the development of unified policies, guidelines and codes of conduct, with the long-range goal of fostering greater integrity in research worldwide.

The Statement is the product of the collective effort and insights of the 340 individuals from 51 countries who participated in the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity. These included researchers, funders, representatives of research institutions (universities and research institutes) and research publishers. The Statement was developed by a small drafting committee (listed below); discussed and commented upon before, during and after the 2nd World Conference; and then finalized for release and global use on 22 September 2010.

Purpose

Publication of the Singapore Statement on Research Integrity is intended to challenge governments, organizations and researchers to develop more comprehensive standards, codes and policies to promote research integrity both locally and on a global basis.

The principles and responsibilities summarized in the Statement provide a foundation for more expansive and specific guidance worldwide. Its publication and dissemination are intended to make it easier for others to provide the leadership needed to promote integrity in research on a global basis, with a common approach to the fundamental elements of responsible research practice.

The Statement is applicable to anyone who does research, to any organization that sponsors research and to any country that uses research results in decision-making. Good research practices are expected of all researchers: government, corporate and academic. To view and download copies of the Statement, click on the links to the right. >>>
_________________________________________________________________
Disclaimer. The Singapore Statement on Research Integrity was developed as part of the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity, 21-24 July 2010, in Singapore, as a global guide to the responsible conduct of research. It is not a regulatory document and does not represent the official policies of the countries and organizations that funded and/or participated in the Conference. For official policies, guidance, and regulations relating to research integrity, appropriate national bodies and organizations should be consulted. Posted 22 September 2010;
Statement Drafting Committee:
Nicholas Steneck and Tony Mayer, Co-chairs, 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity
Melissa Anderson, Chair, Organizing Committee, 3rd World Conference on Research Integrity

More retractions from Nobelist - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

2010-09-24T10:39:00.002+03:00

Two prominent journals have retracted papers by Nobel laureate Linda Buck today because she was "unable to reproduce [the] key findings" of experiments done by her former postdoctoral researcher Zhihua Zou, according to a statement made by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC), where Buck worked at the time of the publications.

These retractions, a 2006 Science paper and a 2005 Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) paper, are tied to a 2001 Nature paper that she retracted in 2008, due to the inability "to reproduce the reported findings" and "inconsistencies between some of the figures and data published in the paper and the original data," according to the retraction. Zou was the first author on all three papers and responsible for conducting the experiments.

The FHCRC is currently conducting an investigation into the issue, said Kristen Woodward, senior media relations manager, but no findings of misconduct have been made. John Dahlberg of the Office of Research Integrity declined to comment on the matter.

The paper in PNAS, which has been cited 61 times according to ISI, describes how smells from substances with similar molecular structures elicit "strikingly similar" neuronal patterns in the olfactory cortex of mice brains across individuals, supporting the presence of "olfactory maps" that follow "an underlying logic," according to the paper. The Science paper, cited 73 times, furthers the research and supports that mixed smells, such as chocolate and citrus, activate neurons in the olfactory cortex that chocolate or citrus do not when presented individually, which may explain why these mixtures tend to smell like completely different substances to humans.

Fortunately, the retractions will not have a large impact on the field, Donald Wilson, an olfactory researcher at New York University and Nathan Kline Institute, told The Scientist in an email. "The story of how cortical odor processing occurs doesn't change," he said. "Work in our own lab and others have now also shown the highly distributed, sparse nature of odor processing in the olfactory cortex, and the complex processes involved in dealing with odor mixtures, much as these two now retracted papers showed."

Zou was unavailable for comment, as his current location is unknown, according to FHCRC. After completing his post doctoral research with Buck at FHCRC in 2005, Zou took an assistant professor position at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston. In November of 2008, however, Zou was laid off from the institution, along with 2,400 other UTMB staff members, after Hurricane Ike ripped the university apart that September, according to Raul Reyes, the director of media relations at the UTMB.

In 2008, Zou wrote in a statement provided by UTMB that he was "disappointed" by the Nature retraction, and denied any misconduct on his part. While Zou agreed to the Nature retraction, he "declined to sign" the Science retraction, as reported online today in Science. But "we have no information to suspect misconduct," Natasha Pinol, senior communications officer at the AAAS/Science Office of Public Programs, told The Scientist in an email.

In addition to the irreproducible results, the PNAS paper also contained "figures inconsistent with original data," according to the FHCRC statement. While the PNAS retraction is "not embargoed," according to Managing Editor Daniel Salsbury, the journal refused to share any information with The Scientist before deadline, noting that the retraction would appear online after 2:00 p.m. EDT this afternoon.

The research that won Buck the 2004 Nobel Prize, which she shared with olfactory researcher Richard Axel of Columbia University "for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system," was unrelated to the research in the retracted papers.

Read more: More retractions from Nobelist - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/57699/#comments#ixzz10Qk5Xy3p

A Reflection on Plagiarism, Patchwriting, and the Engineering Master's Thesis

2010-09-19T09:59:00.002+03:00

Edward J. Eckel,

edward.eckel@wmich.edu

How many times has a graduate student asked you questions such as the following: "How many words do I need to change so I'm not plagiarizing?" or "If my professor gives me his article or patent and tells me to go ahead and 'use it', do I need to cite it?" Such questions indicate a profound need for clarification of issues like plagiarism and attributing sources. This need is a result of a disconnect between expectations for graduate students in the sciences and technology, and how they are being educated to meet those expectations. >>>

When is self-plagiarism ok? - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

2010-09-15T12:52:00.002+03:00

When Robert Barbato of the E. Philip Saunders College of Business at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) heard he was being accused of plagiarizing his own work, he was a bit surprised. "I can't plagiarize myself -- those are my own words," he said.

And he is not alone in his views. Some scientists and publishers argue that it's "unavoidable" for scientists to re-use portions of their own text (not images or data, of course) from previous papers, and doing so may even be good practice. But others disagree, including many journals -- who have retracted papers in response.

"There are many ways you can say the same thing even when it comes to very technical language," said Miguel Roig of St. John's University, who has written extensively about plagiarism in academic literature. "It's a matter of what some have labeled poor scholarly etiquette."

In Barbato's case, the institutional committee formed to review the case unanimously decided to dismiss it. While the authors had reused some text in the introduction and methodology sections in two papers they had submitted simultaneously on gender differences in entrepreneurial business endeavors, the data were different and the papers reached vastly different conclusions. "Nobody saw anything wrong with this really," recalled Patrick Scanlon of RIT's department of communication, who served on the committee.

"Sometimes [text reuse] is just unavoidable," agreed Catriona Fennell, director of journal services at Elsevier. "Really, how many different ways can you say the same thing?" Because scientists tend to study the same topic over many years or even their entire careers, some aspects of their research papers, particularly the literature review and methodology, will be repeated. Once they've figured out how to word it succinctly and accurately, some argue, it's best left unchanged. "You're laying the groundwork for an ongoing discussion [so] making changes might actually be a bad idea," Scanlon said. "It would muddy the waters."

Indeed, even editors that tend to be on the strict side when it comes to text recycling make exceptions. Anesthesia & Analgesia recently pulled a paper due to the offense, as reported on the Retraction Watch blog, but the journal's Editor-in-Chief Steven Shafer said that the publication does not retract papers that only reuse text in the methodology section. "This is a very difficult area," admitted Shafer. While the recently retracted paper contained "multiple areas of duplicated verbatim or nearly verbatim text throughout," he said, not all cases are so straightforward, and each one "must be a judgment call."

With evidence that duplicate publications are on the rise, and estimates of more than 200,000 duplicates already archived in Medline, the scientific community is in dire need of better guidelines as to where to draw the line with respect to self-plagiarism -- and a better way of catching those that cross it.

"It's unfortunately a very gray area," said Jonathan Bailey, a copyright and plagiarism consultant and a writer for the website Plagiarism Today. "[When people] come to me asking what the lines are, I always have to say the same thing: 'You're going to have to talk to the publication you're submitting to.'"

The problem is that most publications don't have "hard and fast rules," Fennell said of Elsevier's journals. The most comprehensive guidelines with respect to self-plagiarism come from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), but these guidelines refer only to truly "redundant publication," in which authors are attempting to pawn off old research as fresh and new. They contain no advice about scientists re-using their own text.

"There's nothing that says you can't have over 30 percent of your introduction being highly similar," said Harold "Skip" Garner, executive director of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, who has published several articles on plagiarism in scientific publishing. "There's nothing like that because it's impossible to calculate."

The good news is that with the bulk of publishing now done electronically and the advent of text similarity software to recognize possible cases of redundant publishing, identifying copied text is becoming a much less onerous task than it used to be. eTBLAST, for example, is a free text comparison program that searches the millions of abstracts archived in Medline, as well as a few other publically available databases. Once the publication spots a possible duplication, it's added to the Déjà vu database of highly similar citations, where scientists can evaluate and comment on the entries.

Probably the most widely used program to spot plagiarism in scientific publishing is Crosscheck, launched in June 2008 by CrossRef. A total of 119 publishers (nearly 50,000 journals) subscribe to the plagiarism detection program, including Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, and Springer, who donate their full text content to the database, which currently holds some 25 million pieces of scientific literature, and is "growing steadily," according to CrossRef Product Manager Kirsty Meddings. Crosscheck's subscribers can scan the database with the same iThenticate software used by Turnitin to check for possible duplications.

So far, the journals that have put the technology to use say it's working. Of the 60 papers flagged as having a high percentage of overlap with other publications in the first three months that the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics used Crosscheck (starting last March), "about 60 percent were self plagiarism," said David Marshall, the publisher at SIAM. "That is the majority of what we're uncovering."

"In my view, [having these programs] is one of the best things that ever happened because it puts scientists on notice," Roig said. Indeed, some journals have taken to explicitly announcing that they use Crosscheck in their instructions to authors, and/or post the Crosscheck logo on their website, hoping that just the threat of getting caught will act as a deterrent.

Even with these programs, however, editors must be careful, Bailey warned -- even high degree of text similarity can sometimes be legit. "It really is about context," Fennell agreed. "It's good software, but it doesn't replace human judgment."

The problem now is how to weed through the hundreds of thousands of suspected cases of duplicated publications currently in the scientific literature. "It's one thing to be a deterrent and preventative in the future," said Garner, but "who's going to clean up the mess that's already there?"

Chinese journal finds 31% of submissions plagiarized

2010-09-09T22:50:00.005+03:00

Yuehong Zhang
Nature 467 , Page: 153 Date published: (09 September 2010)
doi:10.1038/467153d

Since October 2008, we have detected unoriginal material in a staggering 31% of papers submitted to the Journal of Zhejiang University–Science (692 of 2,233 submissions). The publication, designated as a key academic journal by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, was the first in China to sign up for CrossRef's plagiarism-screening service CrossCheck (Nature 466, 167; 2010).

We are therefore campaigning for authors, researchers and editors to be on the alert for plagiarism and to work against cultural misunderstandings. In ancient China, for example, students were typically encouraged to copy the words of their masters.

To this end, we have given lectures and written three papers (including Y. H. Zhang Learn. Publ. 23, 9–14; 2010) that have been widely publicized in China's media (see http://go.nature.com/dPey7X; in Chinese) and reported in CrossRef's quarterly online news magazine (see http://go.nature.com/icUwvh). Our website displays the CrossCheck logo to remind authors of their responsibilities.

Other Chinese journals are also policing plagiarism, using software launched in 2008 by China's Academic Journals Electronic Publishing House and Tongfang Knowledge Network Technology in Beijing.

Scientific misconduct estimated to drain millions each year - SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

2010-08-17T22:07:00.001+03:00

Katherine Harmon

As speculation swirls around the status of possible investigations into research by the prolific Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser, a new study drills down to figure out the true cost of scientific misconduct.

Neither Harvard nor the federal government, which has funded some of Hauser's work that has been retracted or amended, has come forward with statements about the status of the scholar's work. But in the meantime, any investigation is likely costing the university—and possibly the government—a pretty penny, according to the new work, published online August 17 in PLoS Medicine.

Scientific misconduct is defined as "fabrication, falsification or plagiarism in proposing, performing or reviewing research or in reporting research results," according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI). A 2009 meta-analysis of misconduct studies found that about 14 percent of responding scientists reported having witnessed falsification by others—and 2 percent confessed (anonymously) to having been involved in fabrication, falsification or modification of data themselves.

An inquiry into scientific misconduct often leads to research disruption, evidence confiscation and lengthy meetings, all of which can add up quickly in terms of expenses such as faculty and staff labor. A typical case might run in the neighborhood of half a million dollars, concluded the authors of the new case study, led by Arthur Michalek of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y. Taking as an example a real case from their own institution, they estimated the direct costs of that instance of misconduct to be about $525,000.

Michalek and his colleagues break down the costs into three categories: fraudulent research (grants, investments and equipment), investigation (faculty, personnel and external assistance) and remediation (loss of current or pending grants and others in the affected lab). These calculations don't take into account other potential costs (such as lawsuits and loss of future funding) and intangibles (such as loss of trust, demoralization of associates and any research conducted on the basis of fraudulent results).

In the case of the example at their institution, the researchers estimated that the most expensive aspect of the internal investigation was the demands on faculty, who spent hundreds of hours assessing the case both during and outside of formal meetings.

The new policy forum paper does not aim to be a universal measure of misconduct costs. "Our experience will likely not be wholly representative of other institutions," the researchers noted, acknowledging that their estimates thus far "amount to a 'best guess' scenario."

By their calculations, however, the 217 U.S. cases of misconduct reported to the OIR in 2009 would add up to more than $110 million each year. And the actual rate of misconduct remains uncertain, "owing largely to its clandestine nature as well as to the problem of underreporting," the researchers noted.

Steps to avoid wrongdoing in the first place—such as education, training, mentoring and monitoring—are not free either. But, Michalek and his colleagues estimate that, "the costs of these proactive activities pale in comparison to the costs of a single case of scientific misconduct."

Combating plagiarism: a shared responsibility

2010-08-16T13:28:00.003+03:00

Sujit D Rathod

Indian J Med Ethics.2010 Jul-Sep;7(3)

ABSTRACT

Scientific progress depends on the free dissemination of original thinking and research. With the evidence base formed by publication, investigators develop and implement additional studies, and policy makers propose new laws and regulations. The ramifications of this evidence can affect millions of lives and reallocate considerable resources for programmes or research. As such, it is incumbent on investigators to conduct rigorous research, which precludes engaging in scientific misconduct such as falsification, fabrication and plagiarism. This article addresses the causes and consequences of plagiarism and the processes by which plagiarism is discovered. It concludes by considering the responsibilities of members of the research community in preventing and addressing plagiarism.

Japanese Plagiarism and Misrepresentation Case

2010-08-15T08:43:00.001+03:00

Debora Weber-Wulff

A Japanese correspondent has alerted me to the strange case of Serkan Anilir. He is a German-born researcher of Turkish descent who was said to be an Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, Graduate School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo.

He has an impressive biography - but depending on which language you are reading (English, Japanese or Turkish) it is different. He claims to be a Turkish astronaut candidate for NASA, but closer inspection will show that this is his head photoshopped onto the body of Richard Hieb.

He has had "guest professorships" all over the world, according to the list is on the Turkish Wikipedia (translated here). It appears that he gave talks at these schools, but not that he had guest professorships. He is not listed in the official researchers lists for projects he supposedly worked on.

His publication list has a number of anomalies: wrong publisher; long article in a journal that only prints short ones; an examination of a given journal issue shows no article with that name; one publication can be found with the same name and co-author, but not with his name on it.

He also claims to be an Olympic gold medalist in skiing. However, there is no record of this.

Asahi Shinbum, a respected Japanese newspaper, picked this up and reported that they checked his reference that was supposed to be from the Turkish Air Force, but they denied that it was from them.

When things got hot in the Japanese press, an investigation into his dissertation was started. Since it turned out to be more than 40% plagiarized (later reports: 59%) the University of Tokyo revoked his doctorate in March of 2010 (press release in Japanese translated by Google) - the first time in the history of the university that they have done such a thing!

In the aftermath, his talk at TEDxTaipei in Taiwan and other places were mysteriously canceled. It is a shame that they were not open about this. He is no longer listed as a professor at the University of Tokyo. And the university has announced a crackdown on plagiarism.

Nice to hear of a success story, even if it did take 10 years!

Articles withdrawn from Open Access Database

2010-08-15T08:40:00.003+03:00

Debora Weber-Wulff
I just ran across an article from 2007 about arXiv.org, one of the many Open Access databases, that withdrew 65 papers on General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology by 14 Turkish authors on the basis of the papers containing plagiarized material. One of the authors, a grad student at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, was listed on 40 (!) of the papers. >>>

Scientists informally intervene in cases of sloppy research - Ars Technica

2010-07-27T13:15:00.004+03:00

John Timmer

Most people involved in scientific research are well aware of the big three ethical lapses: fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. These acts are considered to have such a large potential for distorting the scientific record that governments, research institutions, and funding bodies generally have formal procedures to investigate incidents, and formal sanctions for those found to have infringed. But the big three are hardly a complete list of all the problems that can produce misleading results; anything from poor record-keeping to sloppy techniques can cause errors to creep into the scientific literature, and there are rarely formal procedures to deal with them.

That doesn't mean they're not dealt with, however. A survey published by Nature has found that researchers regularly engage in informal interventions with colleagues if they suspect that there's any form of misconduct going on—even if they think the problems are inadvertent.

The survey asked about what its authors term "acts that could corrupt the scientific record," and defined them very broadly to include things like "poor supervision of assistants, carelessness, authorship disputes, failure to follow the rules of science, conflicts of interest, incompetence, and hostile work environments that impact on research quality." To get a sense for how these are dealt with, they looked up several thousand researchers who have received funding from the National Institutes of Health, and asked them to fill out an online survey.

The questions in the survey, as well as the responses of those queried, have been posted in a PDF at the authors' website.

Good news and bad news

The majority of the 2,600 researchers who responded had experienced a case where they suspected scientific errors were occurring—84 percent, in total. The authors ascribe this number, which is much higher than most other estimates, to the loose definition of misconduct that they provided. An alternate explanation might be that the self-selecting group that responded was more did so in part because they were aware of these issues. The authors omitted the 400 or so who had never noticed misconduct from most of their further analysis.

The good news for the scientific community is that, when researchers became aware of potential problems, they were fairly likely to do something about it. Almost two-thirds reported taking some type of action about the issues they noticed. Of the remainder, most felt that either action was already underway, or were too removed from the lab with issues to have a good sense of how to intervene.

Over 30 percent of those who acted went straight to the source, and had a discussion with the person they felt was having troubles. Another eight percent sent a message of concern to that individual (90 percent of these were signed), while 16 percent alerted someone in a position of authority about the trouble.

In about 21 percent of the cases where someone chose to intervene, the issue got bumped up to formal proceedings. Some of these may have been the result of denial on the part of the people involved (19 percent of the responses) or cases where the individuals failed to act at all (another 14 percent). Still, there were some good outcomes; in about 30 percent of the cases, the problem was either corrected or it was recognized that it was too late to do anything about it. One striking number here was that, out of all these instances, only a fraction of a percent turned out to be cases where the worries about problems were unwarranted.

About equal numbers of those polled expressed satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the results. Over half also felt that the incident had either had no effect on their career, or had even enhanced it. Still, that would seem to leave a lot of individuals who were dissatisfied and suffered some form of negative impact from the event.

There are a lot of interesting details in the numbers, as well. For example, many of those who chose to act did so in part because they considered their institutions unlikely to do anything. Those who were satisfied with the outcomes were also more likely to have been in a situation where the problems were inadvertent.

Overall, there are some promising aspects to these results. Scientists clearly feel that their ethics compel them to intervene in cases where the potential to distort the scientific record doesn't rise to the level of actual fraud. And many of these interventions appear to end in a satisfactory manner. But there are clearly still cases where institutions don't take the issues seriously, and the scientists who try to do the right thing feel that they suffer consequences as a result.

There's no obvious way to force institutions to take scientific errors and misconduct seriously. But the institutions that do so may want to consider the evidence that this informal policing of scientific ethics takes place. Providing support and advice on how to manage these situations, which can easily devolve into conflict, could significantly improve the scientific community's ability to police itself.

Nature, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/466438a (About DOIs).

Prof Faces Plagiarism Charge

2010-07-12T08:13:00.005+03:00

Shanghai Daily
A university professor is at the center of a plagiarism scandal after he was accused of copying from books written by Western researchers in his doctoral dissertation.

Zhu Xueqin, a history professor at Shanghai University, denied the online accusation after a newspaper report about the controversy and said he would write back to refute the accusation soon.

School officials said they were aware of the allegation and would study it, but no action has been taken so far.

A popular online post said Zhu's doctoral dissertation "The Collapse of Moral Utopia" had copied from several overseas books including "Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue" by American scholar Carol Blum.

Zhu said that he had listed the book in his references and made annotations.

He said the person accusing him of plagiarism should reveal his or her identity. If so, Zhu said he would be willing to talk with the person.

The online poster goes by the name "Isaiah" and is a PhD student, but has thus far declined to reveal his or her true identity, according to Oriental Morning Post.

Isaiah said Zhu copied lengthy paragraphs without attributions and listed many detailed examples. Moreover, Zhu copied the book's main idea, context, examples and structure, Isaiah alleges.

Zhu got his PhD degree in 1992 and his doctoral dissertation was published in 1994.

Isaiah said that Zhu may not be guilty of plagiarism according to academic norms at that time, but that he would surely be guilty if he had published it today.

Similar academic plagiarism scandals occurred in recent years.

Wang Mingming, a professor at Peking University, was accused of copying a book by an American researcher in 2002. The university ceased his recruitment of doctoral students.

Shanghai's Fudan University canceled Xu Yan's associate professor title last February after plagiarism lawsuits were filed against her.

Journals step up plagiarism policing

2010-07-08T22:01:00.003+03:00

Nature 466, 167 (2010), doi:10.1038/466167a

Cut-and-paste culture tackled by CrossCheck software.

Declan Butler

Major science publishers are gearing up to fight plagiarism. The publishers, including Elsevier and Springer, are set to roll out software across their journals that will scan submitted papers for identical or paraphrased chunks of text that appear in previously published articles. The move follows pilot tests of the software that have confirmed high levels of plagiarism in articles submitted to some journals, according to an informal survey by Nature of nine science publishers. Incredibly, one journal reported rejecting 23% of accepted submissions after checking for plagiarism.

Over the past two years, many publishers (including Nature Publishing Group) have been trialling CrossCheck, a plagiarism checking service launched in June 2008 by CrossRef, a non-profit collaboration of 3,108 commercial and learned society publishers. The power of the service — which uses the iThenticate plagiarism software produced by iParadigms, a company in Oakland, California — is the size of its database of full-text articles, against which other articles can be compared. Publishers subscribing to CrossCheck must agree to share their own databases of manuscripts with it. So far, 83 publishers have joined the database, which has grown to include 25.5 million articles from 48,517 journals and books.

Catching copycats

As publishers have expanded their testing of CrossCheck in the past few months, some have discovered staggering levels of plagiarism, from self-plagiarism, to copying of a few paragraphs or the wholesale copying of other articles. Taylor & Francis has been testing CrossCheck for 6 months on submissions to three of its science journals. In one, 21 of 216 submissions, or almost 10%, had to be rejected because they contained plagiarism; in the second journal, that rate was 6%; and in the third, 13 of 56 of articles (23%) were rejected after testing, according to Rachael Lammey, a publishing manager at Taylor & Francis's offices in Abingdon, UK.

The three journals were deliberately selected because they had seen instances of plagiarism in the past, says Lammey. "My suspicion is that when we roll this out to other journals the numbers would be significantly lower." Mary Ann Liebert, a publishing company in New Rochelle, New York, has found that 7% of accepted articles in one of its journals had to be rejected following testing, says Adam Etkin, director of online and Internet services at the company.

CrossRef's product manager for CrossCheck, Kirsty Meddings, based in Oxford, UK, says that publishers are now checking about 8,000 articles a month, but many say that they have few hard statistics on the levels of plagiarism they are finding. Most are delegating CrossCheck testing to journal editors, and have not yet compiled detailed results. "We leave the use of the service to the discretion of the editor-in-chief of the journal, with some choosing to check every submission, but most use it only to check articles they consider suspicious," says Catriona Fennell, director of journal services at Elsevier in Amsterdam. "We are seeing a really wide variety of usage."

Publishers are unsure whether plagiarism is on the increase, whether it is simply being discovered more often, or both. "Not so many years ago, we got one or two alleged cases a year. Now we are getting one or two a month," says Bernard Rous, director of publications at the Association for Computing Machinery in New York, the world's biggest learned society for scientific computing, which is in the early stages of implementing CrossCheck. "There probably is more plagiarism than people have been aware of," adds Lammey.

Casting the net wider

The levels of plagiarism uncovered by CrossCheck have been more than enough to persuade publishers to embrace the software. "As you can see, CrossCheck is having an effect both on the papers we review and those we accept for publication, and with this in mind, we're keen to roll this trial out to our other journals," says Lammey. Most of the publishers interviewed by Nature said they had similar plans.

Using the CrossCheck software brings extra costs and overheads for journals. Publishers seem to find the fees reasonable, which start out at $0.75 per article checked and decrease with volume. The bigger overhead, they say, is the time needed for editors to check papers flagged by the software as suspiciously similar.

Establishing plagiarism requires "expert interpretation" of both articles, says Fennell. The software gives an estimate of the percentage similarity between a submitted article and ones that have already been published, and highlights text they have in common. But similar articles are sometimes false positives, and some incidents of plagiarism are more serious than others.

Self-plagiarism of materials and methods can sometimes be valid, for example, says Fennell. "There are only so many different ways you can describe how to run a gel," she says. "Plagiarism of results or the discussion is a greater concern." Sorting out acceptable practice from misconduct can often take a lot of time, says Lammey.

Overall, publishers say that they are delighted to have a tool to police submissions. "We are using CrossCheck on about a dozen journals, and it has spotted things that we would otherwise have published," says Aldo de Pape, manager of science and business publishing operations at Springer in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. "Some were very blatant unethical cases of plagiarism. It has saved us a lot of embarrassment and trouble."