Borrowing words, or claiming them?

Editorial

Nature Immunology 10, 225 (2009)
doi:10.1038/ni0309-225

Journals are taking steps to stem of the practice of plagiarism.

Have you ever experienced a sense of déjà vu after reading a colleague's manuscript or researching a topic of interest? A paragraph or entire section sounds eerily familiar—too familiar, perhaps, because it is a word-for-word, verbatim (or nearly so, with a few synonyms tossed in) replication of another piece written by different authors. Or maybe a result or hypothesis is claimed to be 'novel' but in fact others have reported such findings and the previous work is not cited. Or the same data are presented in both earlier and subsequent publications from an author, but the later publication fails to acknowledge the fact that the data were included in the earlier work. Are any of these situations acceptable? In fact they are not. All three scenarios represent examples of what can be considered plagiarism.>>>