December 31, 2007
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
November 4, 2007
Editorial: It is not just the work - It is also the words
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
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
Plagiarism? No, we're just borrowing better English - Correspondance: NATURE
September 26, 2007
Academic Dishonesty and Graduate Students
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
September 13, 2007
Nearly there!
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 11, 2007
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
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
Abstract
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
August 23, 2007
2007 Plagiarism Ring Affair - 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.
Impact
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
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]
The eprints withdrawn by arXiv are as follows.
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↑ 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.
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↑ 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.
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