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Readers of this Journal may be aware that the admistrators of the internet archive www.arXiv.org have withdrawn a series of papers from the archive because of claimed plagiarism.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.

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.