Author guidance on plagiarism and duplicate publication

Maxine Clarke

The Commentary in the current issue of Nature by Mounir Errami and Harold Garner, A tale of two citations (Nature 451, 397-399;2008), has predictably received a lot of attention. In a nutshell, the authors ask whether scientists are publishing more duplicate papers, and by their newly devised, automated search of seven million biomedical abstracts, provide the answer that yes, they are.

At the Nature Precedings forum on Nature Network, for example, Hilary Spencer wonders whether posting one’s paper on a preprint server, which has been suggested as one possible check/balance in the system, may rather "facilitate the very plagiarism that it can help to later detect. For many authors, this is a legitimate fear in today’s cut-and-paste climate. Is the risk (of facilitating plagiarism) worth the benefit (of facilitating detection)?" A systematic check by journals of their submitted papers against preprint servers for plaigiarism would be needed if Hilary's suggestion has any foundation (see this Nautilus post for details of an earlier scandal along these lines). Such a check, of course, would be another cost to the publisher of the journal before a research paper could be published.

At the Publishing in the New Millennium forum, also at Nature Network, there is an informed and passionate debate among the scientists in the group about whether more duplicate papers are being published in their fields; whether there are legitimate reasons to publish similar versions of the same paper in different journals; and if there is a problem, how it can be stemmed.

Martin Fenner writes about the issue on his blog, Gobbledygook, and from this post links to some other blog discussion arising from the Commentary. There is another post here, on Nascent (NPG's web publishing department blog) by Euan Adie, which refers to the plagiarism-detection software Cross Check.

In the middle of all the heated discussion, it is worth bearing in mind the policy advice that the Nature journals provide for authors and potential authors who would like guidance for how we, the editors, see this issue. So please see our author and reviewers' website for our polices on: plagiarism, fabrication and due credit for unpublished data; duplicate publication; authorship in general; and confidentiality/pre-publicity. We hope that these policies provide clear and helpful guidance. Authors and potential authors wishing more details can find links to relevant, free-access, journal editorials on each of these pages. Feedback and suggestions are welcome, either as comments to this post or via email.

Plagiarism and preprints

Hilary Spencer

In the Publishing in the New Millenium forum, Corie Lok asks about a recent paper in Nature by Mounir Errami and Harold Garner. The paper, A tale of two citations, suggests that there is a high level of duplicate papers being published. These papers may illustrate co-submission, plagiarism, or self-plagiarism (which also occurs when papers have different sets of overlapping authors). In a comment, I suggest that preprint servers may help with detection of plagiarism and self-plagiarism prior to publication by providing the full text of articles for journals to check against. (Steven Harnad, Peter Suber , and others have made the same suggestion.)

A 2006 study identified a number of papers posted to the physics preprint server, ArXiv, which copied papers in ArXiv. In 2007, a minor scandal erupted over the discovery that about 30 papers published in low-profile peer-reviewed journals were heavily copied from other papers in ArXiv (see coverage in Nature). Had the original authors not posted their papers to the preprint server, this plagiarism might never have been detected.

Something rotten in the state of scientific publishing

By Jonathan M. Gitlin


There is an interesting commentary in this week's Nature¹ that takes a look at the subject of plagiarism within the scientific literature. It's certainly a contentious subject; from day one as an undergraduate it was drilled into us that there could be no greater sin than plagiarism, and I assume most other universities are the same. However, just because it's bad, doesn't mean that no one will do it, and, as we know from high-profile fraud cases like Woo Suk Hwang, there will always be scientists out there who bend and break the rules.

These days, just about every scientific paper resides in a an online database, whether it be something like arXiv or PubMed, and that means it's now much easier to scan them for duplications of results and text. Officially, duplicate papers aren't supposed to be a big problem; PubMed claims less than 1,000 instances out of more than 17 million papers. But an anonymous survey of scientists suggest that rate of plagiarism is higher than that; 4.7 percent admitted to submitting the same results more than once, and 1.4 percent to plagiarizing the work of others.

The authors of the article, scientists at UT Southwestern in Texas, have been using a search engine called eTBLAST to search through scientific abstracts in the same way you might search through genome data for specific sequences. Any duplicates are then uploaded to a searchable database, Deja Vu. As might be expected, they managed to find quite a few examples of duplicate work. Out of a preliminary search of 62,000 abstracts, 421 were flagged. Some of these are papers that have been published in two languages, while others are all but identical, including the same authors, but have been submitted to different journals (a practice that is forbidden by every journal I've ever come across).

The article also looks at the nationalities behind such duplicate work; both China and Japan appear twice as often as their publication output suggests they ought to. This may be in part a language issue, as one of the people involved in the plagiarism cases identified by Turkish academics has claimed (subscription only) that, "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." Unfortunately, in most of these cases, the copying goes well beyond individual sentences.

Although plagiarism is inexcusable, it can perhaps be said to be explainable. An academic's career depends upon their publication record: it's used to evaluate their performance for tenure, job applications, and funding, and entire departments are rated on their publications. All of this is determined by the ranking, or impact factor, of the journals for each of the publications. That impact factor is decided by Thomson ISI (the makers of the program Endnote), which has been criticized in the past for the way that it is calculated.

Now that criticism has been renewed, following the publication of an editorial in the Journal of Cell Biology². The authors of that editorial went as far as buying the data that Thomson uses to calculate impact factors, whereupon they found that they couldn't arrive at the same numbers. Thompson have responded to the editorial, and things have been going back and forth since then. A long time ago, I wrote about a proposed alternative to Thomson's impact factors using Google's PageRank algorithm, but I must confess I've heard nothing more on that subject since then. Perhaps it's time for a renewed interest?

1: Nature, 2008. DOI: 10.1038/451397a

2: JCB, 2007. DOI: 10.1083/jcb.200711140

Erratum to: Astrophys Space Sci (2006) 302(1–4):61–65

Energy-momentum of a stationary beam of light in teleparallel gravity
Oktay Aydogdu · Mustafa Salti
DOI 10.1007/s10509-005-9005-8

After investigation and at the request of the President of the Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey, the Editors of Astrophysics and Space Science have decided to retract this paper due to extensive plagiarism of work by others.© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

Erratum to: Astrophys Space Sci (2005) 299(2):159–166

Energy-momentum in the viscous Kasner-type universe in teleparallel gravity
Mustafa Salti
DOI 10.1007/s10509-005-5159-7

After investigation and at the request of the President of the Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey, the Editors of Astrophysics and Space Science have decided to retract this paper due to extensive plagiarism of work by others.© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

Erratum to: Astrophys Space Sci (2006) 301(1–4):43–46

The momentum 4-vector imparted by gravitational waves in Bianchi-type metrics
Ali Havare · Murat Korunur · Mustafa Salti
DOI 10.1007/s10509-006-6303-8

After investigation and at the request of the President of the Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey, the Editors of Astrophysics and Space Science have decided to retract this paper due to extensive plagiarism of work by others.© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

Erratum to: Astrophys Space Sci (2005) 299(3):227–232

Energy of the universe in Bianchi-type I models in Møller’s tetrad theory of gravity
Oktay Aydogdu . Mustafa Salti
DOI 10.1007/s10509-005-7216-7

After investigation and at the request of the President of the Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey, the Editors of Astrophysics and Space Science have decided to retract this paper due to extensive plagiarism of work by others. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

Update on Plagiarism Scandal - Not Even Wrong

Peter Woit

Last summer I wrote here about a plagiarism scandal involving more than 60 arXiv preprints, more than thirty of which were refereed and published in at least 18 different physics journals, some of them quite prestigious ones (see also the page at Eureka Journal Watch). At the time I wondered what action the journals involved in this scandal would take in response to it. Nearly six months later the answer to this question is now in: essentially none at all. As far as I can tell, almost uniformly the journals involved don’t seem to have a problem at all with being used to publish plagiarized material.

Unlike the journals, the arXiv has taken action. It has withdrawn the papers, replaced their abstracts with lists of where they plagiarized from, and put up a web-page explaining all of this. After the scandal became public, one journal, JHEP, did withdraw the one rather egregious example of plagiarism it had published. This was only done after JHEP originally refused to do anything about this when first contacted last March, arguing that since the plagiarized articles were cited in the paper it was all right, and besides, they would only consider doing something if the plagiarized authors filed a formal complaint. Copies of the correspondence about this (and much else) are at this web-site.

The nature of the plagiarism varied greatly among the papers withdrawn by the arXiv. Sometimes all that was involved was self-plagiarism (large parts of one paper were identical with others submitted by some of the same authors), but mostly what was being plagiarized was the contents of papers by others. Mustafa Salti, a graduate student at METU, had his name on 40 of the withdrawn papers, many of which have been published in well-known journals. I checked a few of the online published journal articles corresponding to the withdrawn papers and, besides the JHEP paper, I didn’t find any others where the online journal article gave any indication that the paper was known to be plagiarized.

A more complicated case is that of Ihsan Yilmaz, where the arXiv lists three of his eight arXiv preprints as withdrawn due to plagiarism and one as withdrawn due to “excessive overlap” with two other papers of which he was co-author. Very recently one of his Physical Review D papers, a paper that was not one of the ones on the arXiv, was retracted with the notation:

The author withdraws this article from publication because it copies text, totaling more than half of the article, from the articles listed below. The author apologizes to the authors of these papers and to the publishers whose copyright was violated.

After the scandal broke, Yilmaz had a letter published in Nature where he justified the sort of plagiarism found in his articles, claiming “using beautiful sentences from other studies on the same subject in our introductions is not unusual.” Evidently the editors of the journal General Relativity and Gravitation agreed with Yilmaz. They decided not to do anything about the papers they had published that were withdrawn from the arXiv, writing an editorial in which they defended the papers, while noting that “we do not regard such word for word copying of introductory and descriptive material by others as acceptable.”

I heard about the GRG editorial via an e-mail from a group of the faculty at METU, who write that:

The note is clearly quite unacceptable and insufficient in the fight against plagiarism. We cannot help but ask whether the Editors seriously believe that those who cannot compose their own sentences are in fact capable of producing genuine research worthy of publishing in General Relativity and Gravitation.

and note the retraction of the Physical Review D article, which they regard as a much more appropriate response

Update: Someone helpfully sent me pdfs of the two GRG articles, marked up to identify the plagiarized passages. Looking at these, I find it hard to understand why any journal would not withdraw such papers if they made the mistake of publishing them.

Topological defect solutions in the spherically symmetric space-time admitting conformal motion, I.Yilmaz, M. Aygun and S. Aygun. This was gr-qc/0607104, published version Gen.Rel.Grav. 37 (2005) 2093-2104. The arXiv describes it as “having excessive overlap with the following papers also written by the authors or their collaborators: hep-th/0505013 and 0705.2930.”

Magnetized Quark and Strange Quark Matter in the Spherical Symmetric Space-Time Admitting Conformal Motion, C. Aktas and I. Yilmaz. This was arXiv:0705.2930, published version Gen.Rel.Grav. 39 (2007) 849-862. The arXiv describes it as “it plagiarizes astro-ph/0611537, astro-ph/0506256, astro-ph/0203033, astro-ph/0311128, gr-qc/0505144, astro-ph/0611460, and astro-ph/0610840.”

Update: The journal Astrophysics and Space Science is retracting four of the plagiarized papers, by putting up errata on-line which appeared today and are dated January 11, 2008, saying:

After investigation and at the request of the President of the Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey, the Editors of Astrophysics and Space Science have decided to retract this paper due to extensive plagiarism of work by others.

The papers involved are gr-qc/0505079, gr-qc/0602012, gr-qc/0508018, gr-qc/0509022......

Domain wall solutions in the nonstatic and stationary Gödel universes with a cosmological constant (Retracted from PRD)

Retraction: Domain wall solutions in the nonstatic and stationary Godel universes with a cosmological constant [Phys. Rev. D 71, 103503 (2005)]

Ihsan Yilmaz

(Received 8 November 2007; published 7 January 2008)
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.77.029901 PACS numbers: 98.80.Cq, 99.10.Ln

The author withdraws this article from publication because it copies text, totaling more than half of the article, from the articles listed below. The author apologizes to the authors of these papers and to the publishers whose copyright was violated.

____________________________________

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