December 31, 2007

This year’s theme is Borrowing – Is It Plagiarism?

National Institutes of Health - NIH

We have provided three cases, all of which are applicable for all scientific staff, as well as a set of Comments and Guidelines from the Cases and four relevant attachments that include the government’s definition of plagiarism (attachment 2).>>>

December 30, 2007

Scientific Plagiarism, is Also Present in the Morphological Sciences

Mariano del Sol

* Editor of the International Journal of Morphology, Faculty of Medicine, Universidad de La Frontera, Temuco, Chile. ijmorpho@ufro.cl - mdelsol@ufro.cl


Each time there are more ethical violations in scientific publications that even reach basic disciplines such as morphological publications some of which have affected our journal.

Initially my intent was to try only one sensitive issue, protagonized by investigators of the university of the Middle East (Egypt and Saudi Arabia) that involved work published in the Egyptian Journal of Histology and the InternationalJournal of Morpkology. However, I will also address other issues related with scientific plagiarism, two of which directly affected the Revista Chilena de Anatomía (Chilean Anatomical Journal), Revista Médica de Chile, Odontólogo Moderno and the International Journal of Morphology.

Some scientific journals deal with scientific plagiarism as a mere ethical violations that affects a part of the publication process, including these ethical violations, not only of fictitious and unjustified papers, but also including those duplicate and fragmented publications, and including those where there is invention, falsification and/or malicious manipulations of the information. However I believe, as do others that scientific plagiarism is not an ethical violation, rather it constitutes scientific fraud. The Dictionary of the Spanish Language (RAE, 2007) defines it as the "copy of the substantial portion of foreign work, publishing it as ones own".

There is no agreement among scientists as far as the outreach and number of scientific plagiarism or if these have increased in the past years, however suffice to say that by reviewing Internet it is clearly effective that this type of fraud is present in all areas of knowledge and information, from literature to theoretical physics. In regard to the latter and as an example, the impressive case of a group of students of the University of Ankara (Turkey), who were able to publish over 40 articles in journals, in only 22 months without being detected by the editorial bodies of the journal, despite all of the articles being extracted from others published by specialists. This scientific theft was discovered by professors of the Masters Program that these students were involved in by the Rector of the University of Ankara who requested that said articles be withdrawn from the Journal of High Energy Physics. >>>


November 12, 2007

ITAP - Institute of Theoretical and Applied Physics

ANNOUNCEMENT
The following information is brougth to the attention of international scientific community.
Recently, the plagiarism understood to be committed by some that brought shame to all Turkish physicists have found much echo in the international community.
We, as the Scientific Committee of ITAP condemn these unethical acts that attempt to defame the international credibility of many Turkish institutions, hope that authorities will bring the power of Turkish and international rules to their fullest on the culprits and announce that we are ready to help andcooperate with the implementation of additional preventative measures in this matter. In addition to this, we as ITAP Scientific Committee announce that some individuals, although they have no afiliation nor did any short or long term scientific visits to ITAP, have used ITAP's name as an affilition in their publications.
Currently there is no researcher affiliated by ITAP including the Director and the Scientific Committee members, and all efforts in ITAP are currently carried on the voluntary basis. As far as we know these publications are in the web pages (some are unfortunately already published) http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007ChPhL..24..355A
and http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0525 (withdrawn by the archieve)
The relevant administrators of these archieves are to be informed about this notice.
We as ITAP Scientific Committee, will make the necesary legal applications against these misuses of ITAP's name.
ITAP Scientific Committee

November 4, 2007

Editorial: It is not just the work - It is also the words


Indian J Crit Care Med 2007;11:169-72
While one can sympathize with the handicaps in language faced by the Turkish physicists it is important to remember that it is the responsibility of the scientist to meet ethical standards established by the journals or societies in which they intend to publish. Indeed, the example from Turkey highlights a lack of understanding that scientists are also writers and that published language is as proprietary to a scientist as discovery is.>>>

October 30, 2007

Editorial note: The issue of plagiarism

Gen Relativ Gravit
DOI 10.1007/s10714-007-0531-2

EDITORIAL
Editorial note: The issue of plagiarism
George F. R. Ellis · Hermann Nicolai
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007

Readers of this Journal may be aware that the admistrators of the internet archive www.arXiv.org have withdrawn a series of papers from the archive because of claimed plagiarism. Most of these papers have been published in reputable international journals, and the list includes two papers published in General Relativity and Gravitation. Because of the seriousness of these claims, we have investigated these two papers with the following results.

The first is gr-qc/0607104, published in Gen. Rel. Grav. 37:2093–2104 (2005). In this case, it is claimed there is substantial overlap with two other arXiv submissions; but these other papers are written by the same authors.We have checked that the three papers concerned contain different original research results, and this is indeed the case. However there is considerable repetition between them in the introductory material, where cut and paste techniques have been used. We do not see a serious problem in authors using such cutting and pasting techniques from their own papers for introductory material, even though we would prefer that material to be written anew each time. It is a matter of taste as to how much introductory material is repeated in each paper, and our referees generally ask for such duplication to be reduced. There may be more overlap than desirable in these three papers, but this does not constitute plagiarism, as originally claimed by the arXiv administrators.They have since revised that statement to “withdrawal because of excessive overlap” with other papers by the same authors. We do ask referees to comment if they detect such overlap.

The second paper is arxiv:0705.2930 [gr-qc], published in Gen. Rel. Grav. 39: 849–862 (2007). The issue is similar, but here there has been cutting and pasting of introductory material from papers by other authors, rather than from their own papers, and this is certainly objectionable.We do not believe referees or editors can be expected to detect such copying in general; rather their task is to see if the research presented is original and interesting, and this paper is acceptable in that regard; the research results are indeed new. We do not regard such word for word copying of introductory and descriptive material by others as acceptable, as it constitutes plagiarism of that material, even if there is no plagiarism of research results.

We hereby notify our potential authors that we do not regard the practice as acceptable, and we also note that internet search engines can easily detect such word for word copying, as happened in this case.

October 11, 2007

Plagiarism: text-matching program offers an answer - Correspondance: NATURE

John Bechhoefer1
The removal of almost 70 papers from the arXiv server on suspicion of plagiarism is dismaying (Nature 449, 8; doi:10.1038/449008b 2007). But, in a similar way to that currently being tested by the cooperative group of publishers CrossRef ('Academic accused of living on borrowed lines' Nature 448, 632–633; doi:10.1038/448632b 2007), the search technology that led to this removal could be used to reduce future problems.
Every paper submitted to arXiv could be examined by a search engine that looks for overlap or correlation with all previous arXiv submissions. If enough of a match is found, a message could be sent to the submitter, listing the work(s) in which similarities have been detected. Should the submitter wish to proceed with their submission, the program would notify the editorial board and trigger an automatic review. The submitter would also be given the chance to explain that the flagged papers were not copied or that the copying was for some reason legitimate.
Such a system would address the problem of plagiarism only among papers published in arXiv, but apparently that would already be an improvement. And although plagiarists might opt to copy and translate from foreign-language journals, or simply alter wording enough to pass muster, making it more difficult will at least discourage the lazier offenders.
As journals should welcome eliminating plagiarism at the preprint stage before publication, they could support the effort by giving the arXiv site search access to their own full-text databases.

Plagiarism? No, we're just borrowing better English - Correspondance: NATURE

Ihsan Yilmaz1
The accusations made by arXiv that my colleagues and I have plagiarized the works of others, reported in your News story 'Turkish physicists face accusations of plagiarism' (Nature 449, 8; doi:10.1038/449008b 2007) are upsetting and unfair.
It's inappropriate to single out my colleagues and myself on this issue. For those of us whose mother tongue is not English, using beautiful sentences from other studies on the same subject in our introductions is not unusual. I imagine that if all articles from specialist fields of research were checked, similarities with other texts and papers would easily be found. In my case, I aimed to cite all the references from which I had sourced information, although I may have missed some of them.
Borrowing sentences in the part of a paper that simply helps to better introduce the problem should not be seen as plagiarism. Even if our introductions are not entirely original, our results are — and these are the most important part of any scientific paper.
In the current climate of 'publish or perish', we are under pressure to publish our findings along with an introduction that reads well enough for the paper to be published and read, so that our research will be noticed and inspire further work.

September 26, 2007

Academic Dishonesty and Graduate Students

CEW Brownbag Discussion
• Research on academic dishonesty among graduate students is comparatively limited. Most studies of academic dishonesty in higher education have tended to focus on undergraduates or on students as a whole, without distinguishing between graduate and undergraduate students. As a result, much of the available information on graduate-level academic integrity issues is anecdotal.

Incidences of Academic Dishonesty By Graduate Students:

• McCabe, Butterfield, and Trevino (2006) found that 56% of MBA students surveyed self-reported having cheated in the previous year, while 47% of non-MBA graduate students reported the same.
On the blog resource “commit-education.blogspot.com,” graduate student admissions of cheating are broken down by discipline as follows: 54% of engineering students, 48% of education students, and 45% of law students surveyed reported having committed academic dishonesty.

• In August of 2007, a massive plagiarism scandal broke in the physical sciences disciplines, in which two graduate students at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, were discovered to have plagiarized a number of their publications:
“…two of the authors of this paper were graduate students with a prodigious track record of publication: over 40 papers in a 22-month span. Dr. Karasu, who sat on the panel that evaluated their oral exams, became suspicious when their knowledge of physics didn't appear to be consistent with this level of output. … ‘All they had done was literally take big chunks of others' work using the “copy and paste” technique,’ Dr. Sarioglu said.” (From Arstechnica.com, August 7, 2007)

The case is worse than it seems, however; there were a number of coauthors involved in each of the papers, all of whom (at least 20 people) are now implicated in this scandal.....

September 17, 2007

A Case of Plagiarism in the Physics Preprint Server arXiv.

Alex Bienkowski

One of the more interesting developments in web-based scientific publishing has been the growth of arXiv, a “preprint” server originally launched by Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos and now hosted at Cornell. The system was first called xxx, and the domain was high-energy physics. Later on, the subject focus was broadened to include most of the rest of physics, math, statistics and quantitative biology. Physicists post their drafts on arXiv to have the community review them and suggest improvements. There was some fear at first that physics journals were headed for the bone yard, but that does not seem to have happened, since many authors go on to work up their preprints for publication in the accustomed style. arXiv has become a very interesting and important example of how internet publication can work, since physicists worldwide use it constantly. Maybe some of them use it a little too much, since Nature reported an outbreak of plagiarism based in four Turkish universities. A couple of degree candidates had some impressive publication lists, in a rather outre area of Relativity theory, but they seemed to be having some trouble with Newtonian mechanics. Somebody smelled a rat, and did some digging on arXiv. It turns out that there had been quite a bit of “creative recycling”from one author to another. There was an investigation and in all some 70 publications by 15 authors were removed from the system>>>

September 13, 2007

Nearly there!

Chris Leonard
Plagiarism & PMC Physics A
There has been a lot of recent publicity on the Turkish plagiarism sandal which has affected arXiv and several high-profile physics journals recently. This has been an 'elephant in the room' of science publishing for some years now. Skillfully manipulated sections of manuscripts from several sources are perhaps amongst the hardest examples of plagiarism to detect, but it is not unknown for complete papers to be submitted with just the authors and affilliations changed (as I had during my time at Elsevier).>>>

September 7, 2007

Brane-world black holes and energy-momentum vector (removed from JHEP)

Mustafa Salti et al JHEP12(2006)078 doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2006/12/078

Mustafa Salti1, Oktay Aydogdu1 and Murat Korunur2
1 Department of Physics, Art and Science Faculty, Middle East Technical University, 06531, Ankara-Turkey2
Department of Physics, Faculty of Art and Science, Dicle University, 21280, Diyarbakir-Turkey E-mail: musts6@yahoo.com

This paper has been removed because of plagiarism. We regret that the paper was published.

Received 21 September 2006, accepted for publication 24 November 2006 Published 22 December 2006

September 6, 2007

Turkish Professors Uncover Plagiarism in Papers Posted on Physics Server -THE CHRONICLE of HIGHER EDUCATION

Aisha Labi
Dozens of academic papers containing apparently plagiarized work have been removed by moderators from arXiv, the popular preprint server where many physicists post their work before publication, Nature (subscription required) is reporting. According to the article, 67 papers by 15 physicists at four Turkish universities were pulled after an examination of their content revealed that they “plagiarize the works of others or contain inappropriate levels of overlap with earlier articles.”.>>>

Plagiarism at arXiv, and Nature journals' policies



This week's Nature (449, 8; 2007) features a News story about a plaigiarism scandal involving more than a dozen theoretical physicists at four universities in Turkey. Almost 70 papers by 15 authors have been removed from the popular preprint server arXiv, where many physicists post their work, by the server's moderators. They allege that the papers plagiarize the works of others or contain inappropriate levels of overlap with earlier articles. This is probably the largest single incident of its sort ever seen on the server, according to physicist Paul Ginsparg of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and founder of arXiv. "What these guys did was way over the line," he says. See here for the full version of the story (site licence or subscription required). According to the Nature News story, Ginsparg says that it's not uncommon for scientists with a poor command of English to plagiarize introductions or background paragraphs from earlier work, often adding an appropriate citation. He thinks that although such practices are ethically questionable, it is inappropriate to be overly draconian. A recent analysis turned up numerous examples of plagiarism on the arXiv server (see Nature 444, 524–525; 2006).

The Nature journals' policies on plagiarism can be found on our free-access author and referees' website. The policy page contains links to various (free access) Editorials written in the Nature journals on the topic which, taken together, we hope provide a useful guide for authors.

Turkish physicists face accusations of plagiarism : News : NATURE

Geoff Brumfiel


Abstract
Scores of papers are removed from arXiv server. More than a dozen theoretical physicists at four universities in Turkey seem to be involved in a massive plagiarism scandal.

Almost 70 papers by 15 authors have been removed from the popular preprint server arXiv, where many physicists post their work, by the server's moderators. They allege that the papers plagiarize the works of others or contain inappropriate levels of overlap with earlier articles. This is probably the largest single incident of its sort ever seen on the server, according to physicist Paul Ginsparg of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and founder of arXiv. "What these guys did was way over the line," he says>>>

August 31, 2007

Cases of Plagiarism in Turkey

Dear Colleagues:

You may be already aware of a massive case of plagiarism uncovered recently in Turkey. You can find the details by linking to

http://arxiv.org/new/removals07aug.html

This news will no doubt be as disconcerting to you as it is to me. 
Plagiarism is not the bane of any one country or culture. Our Centre, because of the diverse backgrounds of its community, must be especially 
conscious of this blight and eschew it at all costs.

With best wishes,

K.R. Sreenivasan
Abdus Salam Research Professor
Director, ICTP

Talk:2007 Plagiarism Ring Affair

Blake Stacey

August 23, 2007

2007 Plagiarism Ring Affair - EUREKA

In August of 2007, the technology-oriented website Ars Technica [1] revealed that the arXiv was withdrawing a set of seventeen physics papers due to plagiarism. These papers had been written by a group of graduate students at the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey. After detecting the plagiarism, METU faculty began a process which Ars Technica called "damage control", requesting that the Journal of High Energy Physics withdraw a fraudulent article,[2] and working with arXiv administrators to further the removal process.[3] 
The total number of withdrawals eventually rose to sixty-five articles by fourteen authors,[4] at four Turkish institutions.[5]  
Throughout this article, papers and eprints designated as "plagiarized" have been marked so by arXiv administrators or other sources external to EUREKA.





Uncovery 
At the beginning of August, Philip Gibbs noted on his blog that his 1998 paper "A White Hole Model of the Big Bang"[6] had been plagiarized in a 2006 preprint, "Relative Energy Associated with a White Hole Model of the Big Bang".[7] Describing himself as "more amused than shocked", Gibbs indicated that the material copied from his paper was merely his description of the Lemaitre-Tolman model, not Gibbs' own original work.[8] (He later explained the motivation and general outline of that work on his blog.[9]
Shortly thereafter, arXiv administrators withdrew a second set of eprints, this time a collection of papers from Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University (COMU) in Çanakkale, Turkey.
The journal Nature picked up the story in September,[5] and as the Chronicle of Higher Education blog summarized, 67 papers by 15 physicists at four Turkish universities were pulled after an examination of their content revealed that they "plagiarize the works of others or contain inappropriate levels of overlap with earlier articles." [...] Suspicions were apparently stoked when, during oral defenses of their dissertations last fall, [Mustafa] Salti and another student demonstrated a poor grasp of even the most basic of physics concepts. Professors at the university began to investigate the students' work and turned up several examples of plagiarized work by them, as well as by students and professors at three other Turkish universities — Dicle University, the University of Mersin, and Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University.[10]

Impact
Members of the physics community are still uncertain how severe the damage from this incident will transpire to be. Paul Ginsparg, a physics professor and central figure behind the arXiv, contended that the derivative nature of the plagiarized work minimized the harm it could bring about: "There's little effect on science, since the people who produce high quality work don't need to plagiarize, and the people who do need to plagiarize don't produce high enough quality work to affect anything."[3]
Furthermore, since many of the papers dealt with a rather obscure topic, the Møller version of general relativity, few other physicists would be likely to examine the papers, Ginsparg told Nature.[5]
Others point to the as-yet-unknown extent of the METU-related fraud, and the possibility of other, similar deceptions currently unidentified. In addition, it is difficult to judge whether plagiarizing papers is as harmful as, for example, falsifying data. Since the former generally involves recycling notions which have already gained some degree of scientific acceptance, the primary harm resulting from such plagiarism may be that it furthers the careers of undeserving persons in a scientific community possessing only limited resources.[3] 

List of Affected Journals
The following journals accepted work which the arXiv later identified as plagiarized.
-General Relativity and Gravitation (0705.2930 and gr-qc/0607104).
Peter Woit says, "The situation of the second of these is really confusing, since according to the arXiv it plagiarizes a paper by a completely different group in India, one that the arXiv lists as having "excessive overlap" with an earlier paper by the Turkish plagiarists."
[11]
Woit notes,There are also other papers by some of the same authors which the arXiv does not list as plagiarized (published in Nuclear Physics B, here, Classical and Quantum Gravity, here, International Journal of Modern Physics, here and here).[11]




Plagiarism at COMU
Shortly after the METU story broke, on 2007-08-22, arXiv administrators withdrew sixteen additional eprints, these authored by former graduate students at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University (COMU) in Çanakkale, Turkey. These students, two of whom had shared a thesis advisor, appear to constitute a second Turkish plagiarism ring.

The eprints withdrawn by arXiv are as follows.
*Møller Energy-Momentum Complex in General Relativity for Higher Dimensional Universes. M. Aygun, S. Aygun, I. Yilmaz, H. Baysal, I. Tarhan. Published in Chinese Physics Letters, 24 (2007), 1821. Plagiarizes:
*On the Energy-Momentum Problem in Static Einstein Universe. Sezgin Aygun, Ismail Tarhan, Husnu Baysal. Published: Chinese Physics Letters 24 (2) (2007), 355. Plagiarizes:


*Energy and Momentum of Bell-Szekeres Space-time in Moller Prescription. Sezgin Aygun. Published: Acta Physica Polonica B38 (2007) 73-80. Plagiarizes:

Ragab M. Gad. Energy Distribution of a Stationary Beam of Light. Astrophys.Space Sci. 295 (2005) 451-458.


*The Colliding Plane Wave and Energy-Momentum Problems in General Relativity and Teleparallel Gravity. Sezgin Aygun, Ismail Tarhan, Husnu Baysal, Melis Aygun. Plagiarizes:
Yu-Xiao Liu, Zhen-Hua Zhao, Jie Yang, Yi-Shi Duan. The total energy-momentum of the universe in teleparallel gravity.

V. C. de Andrade, L. C. T. Guillen, J. G. Pereira. Gravitational Energy-Momentum Density in Teleparallel Gravity Physical Review Letters 84 (2000) 4533-4536.

*The Energy of Marder Space-Time in Moller Prescription. Sezgin Aygun, Husnu Baysal, Ismail Tarhan. Plagiarizes: 
Gamal G.L. Nashed. Charged Axially Symmetric Solution, Energy and Angular Momentum in Tetrad Theory of Gravitation. Int. J. Mod. Phys. Lett. A 21 (2006), 3181


*The Energy Momentum Problem in Teleparallel Gravity For Bianchi Type II-VIII-IX Universes. Sezgin Aygun, Melis Aygun, Ismail Tarhan. Autoplagiarism.

*Energy And Momentum Associated With Bianchi Type Universes. Sezgin Aygun, Melis Aygun, Ismail Tarhan. Plagiarizes:  

*Energy Momentum Complexes For Bianchi Type II-VIII-IX Universes. Sezgin Aygun, Melis Aygun, Ismail Tarhan. Plagiarizes:  


*Energy Momentum Localization for Bianchi I-III-V-VI0 Universe in Teleparallel Gravity. Sezgin Aygun, Melis Aygun, Ismail Tarhan. Plagiarizes: 


*Energy Momentum of Marder Universe in Teleparallel gravity. Sezgin Aygun, Husnu Baysal, Ismail Tarhan. International Journal of Theoretical Physics, (2007). Plagiarizes:  
Yu-Xiao Liu, Zhen-Hua Zhao, Jie Yang, Yi-Shi Duan. The total energy-momentum of the universe in teleparallel gravity


*Topological defect solutions in the spherically symmetric space-time admitting conformal motion. Ihsan Yilmaz, Melis Aygun, Sezgin Aygun. Published: General Relativity and Gravitation, 37 (2005) 2093-2104. Plagiarizes:

*On the Energy Momentum in Bianchi Type I-III-V-VI0 Space-Time. Sezgin Aygun, Melis Aygun, Ismail Tarhan. Plagiarizes:


*Energy Momentum Localization in Marder Space-Time. Sezgin Aygun, Melis Aygun, Ismail Tarhan. Plagiarizes:


*Energy and Momentum of The Szekeres Universes in Tele-parallel Gravity. Sezgin Aygun, Ismail Tarhan, Husnu Baysal. Plagiarizes:



*Energy Distribution in Szekeres Type I and II Space Times. Sezgin Aygun, Melis Aygun, Ismail Tarhan. Published: Acta Physica Polonica B37 (2006) 2781-2794. Autoplagiarism.


J.D. Barrow, R. Maartens, C.G. Tsagas. Cosmology with inhomogeneous magnetic fields. Physics Reports 449 (2007) 131-171

A. Perez Martinez, H. Perez Rojas, H. J. Mosquera Cuesta, M. Boligan, M. G. Orsaria. Quark stars and quantum-magnetically induced collapse. International Journal of Modern Physics D14 (2005) 1959

D. Gondek-Rosinska, E. Gourgoulhon, P. Haensel. Are rotating strange quark stars good sources of gravitational waves? Astronomy & Astrophysics 412 (2003) 777-790

R Sharma, S Karmakar, S Mukherjee. Maximum mass of a cold compact star. International Journal of Modern Physics D15 (2006) 405-418

Masaru Shibata, Yuk Tung Liu, Stuart L. Shapiro, Branson C. Stephens. Magnetorotational collapse of massive stellar cores to neutron stars: Simulations in full general relativity. Physical Review D74 (2006) 104026.
References


  1.  The arXiv entry may be viewed here, as of 2007-08-23; the paper was removed from the arXiv, and after some delay from the Journal of High Energy Physics also.



  2. 65 admin withdrawals, arXiv. Accessed 2007-10-26.
    Note that an earlier version of this arXiv page indicated sixty-seven withdrawn papers by fifteen authors, due to an administrative error on arXiv's part.



  3. 5.0 5.1 5.2 Geoff Brumfiel, Turkish physicists face accusations of plagiarism Nature News (subscription required), 2007-09-05. Accessed 2007-09-07.



  4. Figen Binbay, Irfan Acikgoz, Mustafa Salti. Relative Energy Associated with a White Hole Model of the Big Bang, 2006-07-20. Withdrawn from arXiv on 2007-07-26.



  5. Philip Gibbs. A white hole model of the big bang. Event Symmetry 2007-08-25.


  6.  Aisha Labi, Turkish Professors Uncover Plagiarism in Papers Posted on Physics Server, Chronicle of Higher Education blog, 2007-09-06. Accessed 2007-09-07.


  7. 11.0 11.1 Peter Woit. Massive plagiarism scandal, Not Even Wrong 2007-08-23.

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