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. >>>


Random Posts


  • Write My Essay, Please! - The Atlantic

    Richard Gunderman These days, students can hire online companies to do all their coursework, from papers to final exams. Is this ethical, or even legal? A colleague tells the following story. A student in an undergraduate course recently submitted a truly first-rate term paper. In form, it was ... READ MORE>>

  • Study Shows Studies Show Nothing - Money Morning

    Nick Hubble If you’ve ever wondered how a study can show something that just can’t be true, or how studies can completely contradict each other, we’ve figured it out. With a little help of course. After today’s Daily Reckoning, I hope you never believe another ‘study’. Our heartfelt congratulatio... READ MORE>>

  • How to find Plagiarism in Dissertations - Copy, Shake, and Paste

    Germany is awash in another wave of discussions about plagiarism. This time it is the Minister of Education and Research, Annette Schavan. The story about plagiarism in her dissertation broke in May, and the University of Düsseldorf has been examining the case since. Today, October 17, the comm... READ MORE>>

  • Scientific fraud: a sign of the times? - The Guardian

    If you read about scientific fraud in the recent news, it would seem that there is much to worry about. It's on the rise, apparently! There has been a 10-fold increase in the number of retracted papers since the 1970's, and a number of these are due to fraud or suspected fraud. An investigation o... READ MORE>>

  • Misconduct, Not Error, Found Behind Most Journal Retractions - THE CHRONICLE

    Paul BaskenResearch misconduct, rather than error, is the leading cause of retractions in scientific journals, with the problem especially pronounced in more prestigious publications, a comprehensive analysis has concluded. The analysis, described on Monday in PNAS, the Proceedings of the National... READ MORE>>

  • Plagiarism in Turkey - Copy, Shake, and Paste

    Some Turkish academics have been very busy the past few months, it seems. Perhaps inspired by the VroniPlag Wiki documentation in Germany, the authors have put together a massive documentation of plagiarism in Turkish theses that A. Murat Eren, a computer science Ph.D. and post-doc researcher i... READ MORE>>

  • Mathgen paper accepted!

    Nate Eldredge I’m pleased to announce that Mathgen has had its first randomly-generated paper accepted by a reputable journal! On August 3, 2012, a certain Professor Marcie Rathke of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople submitted a very interesting article to Advances in Pure M... READ MORE>>

.

.
.

Popular Posts