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that these students were involved in by the Rector of the University of Ankara who requested that said articles be withdrawn from the Journal of High Energy Physics. >>>

ITAP - Institute of Theoretical and Applied Physics

ANNOUNCEMENT

The following information is brougth to the attention of international scientific community.

Recently, the plagiarism understood to be committed by some that brought shame to all Turkish physicists have found much echo in the international community.

We, as the Scientific Committee of ITAP condemn these unethical acts that attempt to defame the international credibility of many Turkish institutions, hope that authorities will bring the power of Turkish and international rules to their fullest on the culprits and announce that we are ready to help andcooperate with the implementation of additional preventative measures in this matter. In addition to this, we as ITAP Scientific Committee announce that some individuals, although they have no afiliation nor did any short or long term scientific visits to ITAP, have used ITAP's name as an affilition in their publications.

Currently there is no researcher affiliated by ITAP including the Director and the Scientific Committee members, and all efforts in ITAP are currently carried on the voluntary basis. As far as we know these publications are in the web pages (some are unfortunately already published) http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007ChPhL..24..355A

and http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0525 (withdrawn by the archieve)

The relevant administrators of these archieves are to be informed about this notice.

We as ITAP Scientific Committee, will make the necesary legal applications against these misuses of ITAP's name.

ITAP Scientific Committee

Editorial: It is not just the work - It is also the words

Ramaswamy Murali
Indian J Crit Care Med 2007;11:169-72
>>>

While one can sympathize with the handicaps in language faced by the Turkish physicists it is important to remember that it is the responsibility of the scientist to meet ethical standards established by the journals or societies in which they intend to publish. Indeed, the example from Turkey highlights a lack of understanding that scientists are also writers and that published language is as proprietary to a scientist as discovery is.>>>