The insider’s guide to plagiarism

Editorial
Nature Medicine, 707 (2009)

Scientific plagiarism—a problem as serious as fraud—has not received all the attention it deserves.

Reduced budgets are affecting research just as they are every sector of the economy. So, how can struggling scientists increase their chances of securing their share of financial resources in these tough times?Publish, of course!

What? You don’t have the resources to do the experiments? Don’t worry! A little creative writing might be all you need to sail through the financial crisis. Here’s how: use a solid paper as your base; carry out a parallel set of experiments in your favorite model; tweak the data so that the numbers are not identical but remain realistic; and, when you’re ready to write it all up, paraphrase the original paper ad libitum. Last, submit your new manuscript to a modest journal in the hopes that the authors of the paper you used as ‘inspiration’ won’t notice your ‘tribute’ to their work—even though imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, their approval of your ‘reworking’ of their paper cannot be guaranteed. If all goes well, getting a couple of these manuscripts under your belt might make all the difference when you apply for that elusive grant.

Does this strategy work? Unfortunately, all too often it does, even though many eyes examine every paper before it ends up on a printed page. And when scrutiny identifies cases of potential plagiarism, serious corrective action doesn’t always take place. Consider a recent report (Science 323, 1293–1294, 2009) in which software tools and manual comparison helped identify cases of suspected plagiarism. When the authors of 163 suspicious studies were contacted, about 30% disavowed misconduct, and over 20% of coauthors claimed no involvement in writing the papers.
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The truth will out

Editorial

Nature Physics 5, 449 (2009)

Fraud in science is difficult to spot immediately, but, as high-profile cases show, it does get found out. Tackling plagiarism is at least becoming an easier fight.

Introduction
Scientific misconduct comes in many forms. Fabrication lies at one extreme, but plagiarism and 'citation amnesia' are more common. Some have come to question the peer review system, especially following the spectacular cases of Hendrik Schön and Scott Reubens. Schön was a Bell Labs researcher whose organic field-effect transistors exhibited the fractional quantum Hall effect, superconductivity, lasing, you name it. That he didn't keep a lab book or any raw data during his PhD would already constitute bad practice, but then he went on to actually fabricate data. In 2002, a committee found him guilty of scientific misconduct on 16 out of 24 allegations, and at least 21 of his published papers have since been retracted (a new book chronicling Schön's rise and fall is reviewed on p451 of this issue). Reuben's case came to light in March 2009, when 21 of his papers containing faked data were retracted from anaesthesiology journals. Millions of patients have been treated according to his studies of combinations of drugs for pain relief. In many cases, the patients in his clinical trials were made up. >>>

Plagiarism, salami slicing, and Lobachevsky

Leonard Berlin
Department of Radiology, Rush North Shore Medical Center,

Skeletal Radiol (2009) 38:1–4, DOI 10.1007/s00256-008-0599-0

Who made me the genius I am today,
Who’s the Professor that made me that way?
One man deserves the credit,
One man deserves the blame,
And Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.
In one word he told me the secret of success:
Plagiarize! Plagiarize! Plagiarize!
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes.
Only be sure always to call it please “Research.”
Tom Lehrer, “Lobachevsky,” 1953 [1]

A half century ago, then well-known humorist-songwriter Tom Lehrer composed and popularized a song parodying the subject of plagiarism. He named the song after Russian mathematician Lobachevsky (1793–1856), famous for his development of non-Euclidean geometry, not because Lobachevsky was a plagiarist but rather for “prosodic” reasons [1]. Why recall a 55-year-old song today? The answer is obvious: plagiarism has found its way into both the contemporary public news media and the scientific literature. >>>

Dear Plagiarist - INSIDE HIGHER ED

G. Thomas Couser

Dear Student,

When you got your paper back with a grade of F for plagiarism, you reacted in predictable fashion -- with indignant denial of any wrongdoing. You claimed “you cited everything” and denied that you had committed intentional plagiarism, or ever would.

This response is all too familiar to an experienced professor. Only once in my three decades of teaching has a student I caught plagiarizing owned up to it right away. And in that case, I believe (perhaps cynically) that she (a graduate student) thought a forthright confession might lead me to lighten the penalty. It didn’t; I failed her for the course and wrote her up. Indeed, I found out later that she had been caught plagiarizing by a colleague the previous term and let off lightly. I suspect that, because too many professors (many of them adjuncts fearful of student backlash) overlook or are unwilling to pursue plagiarism -- the process can be labor intensive, and it is always unpleasant -- cheating has become a way of life for many students, and they are genuinely surprised at being held responsible for it. So I don’t doubt that your shock is real.>>>