From Ars Mathematica I learned about an article at Ars Technica describing a scandal involving plagiarism of theoretical physics papers by about 20 different people, some of them students at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. Many of the papers were refereed and published in well-known journals, and one made it into what is now perhaps the most well-known particle theory journal, the Journal of High Energy Physics.
According to Dr. Sarioglu, [faculty member at METU] 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. Discussions with Dr. Tekin revealed that the students also did not appear to possess the language skills necessary for this level of output in English-language journals (METU conducts its instruction in English).
This caused these faculty members to go back and examine their publications in detail, at which point the plagiarism became clear. “All they had done was literally take big chunks of others’ work using the ‘copy and paste’ technique,” Dr. Sarioglu said, “steal from here and there to cook up an Intro which is basically the same stuff in all their manuscripts, carry out some really trivial calculations such as taking derivatives of some simple functions, and write up the results in the format of a paper.” The department chair was informed and started an internal investigation; the university’s Ethics Committee has since become involved.
In the mean time, the faculty and administration at METU are attempting to do some damage control. The university’s president personally sent a letter to the Journal of High Energy Physics requesting that the paper be withdrawn—a request that, as noted above, has yet to be acted upon. Meanwhile, the faculty members mentioned above are working with the arXiv administrators to ensure that any plagiarized work is removed.
The Ars Technica article emphasizes the role of the arXiv in this, since the plagiarized papers first appeared there and are still available there, although arXiv administrators have replaced the latest versions of the papers with a notation “withdrawn by arXiv administrators due to plagiarism”. I don’t actually think the arXiv is the real scandal here, rather the fact that refereeing standards in theoretical physics are now so low that obviously plagiarized papers don’t seem to have much trouble getting into even the best journals in the field. Some of the other journals that published plagiarized papers from this same group of people include:
There are also other papers by some of the same authors which the arXiv does not list as plagiarized (published in Nuclear Physics B, here, Classical and Quantum Gravity, here, International Journal of Modern Physics, here and here) .
Remind me again, why is it that universities are paying large sums to get these journals?
Update: My guess is that most theorists are just going to ignore this and pretend it didn’t happen. As far as I can tell, the journals involved haven’t even bothered to add a notation to the articles still available on-line to note that they are plagiarisms, much less do anything to stop this from happening again. But at least Lubos agrees with me:
The journals and arXiv are clearly flooded with papers that no one cares about which is why this thing can happen.
Try searching the arXiv for ‘plagiarizes’ in the abstract.
For our master program, we had an applicant whose application material looked very promising but for whom a letter of recommendation said ‘this is a good student, however, see [a search query to the arXiv]’. It turned out, as an undergraduate student (why on earth do you need publications at that stage?) in mathematics he had taken two papers from the arxiv and resubmitted them after just changing the title and of course the names of the authors.
Now you could argue that math is healthier than HEP as this was discovered by one of the original authors but on the other hand it was simpler as beyond the title all the wording was kept (including the abstract).
This is so stupid! Of course we did not accept this student for our program although we might have without this act of plagiarism.
There is a tool for looking for plagiarism of webpages called Copyscape. Maybe the arxiv should have something like that… or the journal editors.
Ah, it seems they already have such a system at arXiv.
Rien,
Another idea would be to insist that refereeing be done by physicists who either know the literature of their field or are willing to look into it when they don’t know it so well…
This may be too difficult to achieve these days, but if that’s the case, admitting this and shutting down these journals would be a good idea.
What an unorthodox idea! 😉
I would say this is more the fault of the journals than of the referees though. I sometimes get sent papers that are only very tangentially related to my own research, so what do you do then: send it back or try to cobble something together. I have done both.
One would think that just going by the number of reserachers active in any given subfield, they should have managed to send at least one of those plagiarized papers for refereeing to one of the researchers that they plagiarized from…
I was once reading some papers in the physics arXiv on a subject of interest to me, and came across what struck me as a particularly lucid and insightful paper from someone at a University in Portugal. The more I read, the more impressed I became… “Damn (I though), I couldn’t have written this better myself…” And then it dawned on me: I HAD written it myself. The ENTIRE paper (about 12 pages) had simply been cut and pasted, verbatim, from an article of mine that is accessible on the web. The only things different were the abstract, the “author’s” name, and one page of unintelligible nonsense that the guy had appended at the end.
Just for fun, I searched for other papers by this individual, and immediately found another where he had done exactly the same thing with another of my articles.
Now, I know plagiarism is fairly routine in academic papers, and I usually just ignore it, but this “cut and pasting” of a whole paper verbatim seemed particularly blatent, so I sent an email to the arXive, pointing out the two papers and the web sites they were stolen from. To my surprise, the arXiv rather promptly took down the offending papers, replacing them with a note about plagiarism, and sent me a message saying they had contacted the University to inform them of the situation. At that point I was sort of impressed (and surprised) at the level of ethics, although I was actually feeling a little sorry for the “author”, whose career I naively imagined had been irrepairably damaged. As it turned out, I was worried for nothing… About a week later, revised versions of the papers re-appeared on the arXiv, essentially unchanged, but with two or three statements inserted here and there, saying “As explained in reference [x]”, with a reference to my articles. So (apparently), all is well.
On another related point, there has been a recent rash of plagiarized mathematics web sites, apparently by some people in Russia or one of the “stans”. Their exact identity is unclear, but their mode of operation is to copy whole web sites, including the entire directory structures, and then convert all internal links to eliminate any reference to the original site, re-directing them to the bogus site. (They must have fairly sophisticated tools to do this.) Then they give the site a new name, and invent some people, complete with phony biographies, credentials and photos, who claim to be the authors of the material. They then begin to send emails to other people with mathematics web sites, asking them to link to the bogus site (presumably to increase traffic and raise their google rankings).
The ultimate objective of this activity is not clear (to me), but I suspect it is to generate traffic for some kind of phishing activity… I understand the term of art is “social engineering”. They are hosted on either blacklisted ISPs in the US, or else ISPs in Russia, so they are fairly untouchable from a legal standpoint.
I know plagiarism is fairly routine in academic papers, and I usually just ignore it
that’s what many people say : don’t bother.
“Now, I know plagiarism is fairly routine in academic papers…”
Please tell me it ain’t so. I thought even self-plagiarism (where you copy portions of, say, an introduction from your previous paper to another paper even though the two sets of results do not overlap) is frowned upon because of copyright issues.
If the problem is so routine, then where’s the scandal? Or do different fields/subfields have different ethical standards?
I am shocked. Seriously, I am really shocked. What is the world coming to? This is 20 people who did that not only once but in an organized and repeated way, I can’t believe that. I mean, why on earth would one do that. Don’t they have no interest in doing ‘real’ science. Didn’t they ever think about what they are doing to the field?
Sure, one part of the problem is the lacking quality control of peer review. But I think this problem goes back to the sheer amount of papers that get published (or want to get published). And this again goes back to the pressure people have to publish – which not only means that referees get many requests, but they have themselves pressure to publish papers… Taken together (too many publications, pressure to publish fast, lacking quality control) this is bound to get worse, not better, it’s a downwards spiral. The technological improvements that today allow us to have ‘rapid communications’ and an overflow of available information DO influence the way research is done, and it’s about time to realize that it’s necessary to figure out how to best deal with these changes. How about slowing down the ever faster spinning world of science and give people some TIME to think about what they really want to achieve with their work (publications? citations?).
Best,
B.
I wonder, are the chief editors of those journals going to be fired for extreme incompetence? Or are editors going to remain as unaccountable as always have been?
Imagine that a group of high school students looted a famous museum. What would the scandal be, the looting by the students or the incompetence of the museum’s management?
And to think I’m trying to do research and get published the old fashioned way…
I agree with Bee. It is surprising that someone aspiring to a career in science would try to establish themselves through systematic plagiarism. One wonders what brings them into science at all — certainly it doesn’t seem to be a love of discovery, deeper understanding, and desire to contribute to a body of knowledge. It would require an exceptional level of self deception for a plagiarist to look back on past unoriginal work with any satisfaction at all. The whole notion is incompatible with the goals and ideals of science.
However, the problem seems quite solvable, at least in principle. Since most submissions of papers are now done electronically, it should be very possible to look for matches between an incoming paper and a database of electronically submitted and digitized papers. Warning flags could be raised if a paper had more than some minimum number of sentences or paragraphs in common with another paper. A paper would be rejected prior to the refereeing stage until any plagiarism issues are resolved. The arXiv would be one excellent place to implement this.
There are already companies like turnitin.com that perform this service for e.g. high schools, but perhaps a more sophisticated system would be needed than that. And such a system would have problems of its own. Computing resource requirements would be substantial, although they could be reduced by restricting comparisons to papers in the same field or subfield, or restricting searches on hot topics to the past few years. A highly motivated plagiarist might find ways around the system, such as systematically changing a word or two in each sentence, although there may be search techniques that can get around that. Anyway, in principle…
Oh, Bee, shocked… Come on, see things in perspective. There are people of low moral standards everywhere. It is only a piece of luck that they did not start a career in politics, surgery, computer science, law, economics, aviation, …..
I think this is one alarm bell, and I totally concur with Peter (’cause of course, I am a “small Peter Woit” according to lumo) when he asks what are Universities paying for when they send hefty sums to Elsevier and the likes.
But shock… I am shocked for Britain’s decision to extradate a lesbian to be lapidated in Iran today (see my blog), no room for publishing shocks today.
Cheers,
T.
It has been obvious to many that scientific journals will be out of business in the near future, they are too slow and cost too much. On-line journals will take their place. What we need is a way to rate on-line articles.
But then again, I’ve talked to many researchers who say they don’t have time to read because they are too busy writing.
As usual, of course I agree with Tommaso… The fact that there are people out there trying to game the academic system doesn’t qualify as shocking. What is shocking is how many supposedly reputable journals publish blatant plagiarism. The refereeing system in theoretical physics is completely broken and no one seems to care or be willing to do anything about it. This is not news, the Bogdanov scandal was a good example several years ago, but this is even worse.
One interesting question is how many times these authors had their papers given to a competent referee, one who would recognize the plagiarism and report it back to the journal and to the arXiv. Out of their many, many paper submissions, how often did that happen? Virtually never, I suspect…
I don’t agree with Marty that what is needed is a “turnitin” system. The problem is not the blatant plagiarism like this, but the amount of unoriginal and shoddy work being published by theoretical physics journals, including even the best ones. At least in the case of this kind of plagiarism, it is clear to everyone what is going on. If referees are willing to allow this, they’re certainly going to allow a lot of papers through that are little more than older work superficially rewritten. Either these journals should find a way to get papers competently refereed, or they should shut down and stop defrauding the institutions that are paying them for supposedly doing a competent job of “peer review”.
There is large amount of unoriginal crap published in lesser chemistry journals, too (there were some recent high-profile cases of fraud and plagiarism too, but it is less common).
What really gets me are research groups that never checked the literature before starting their project. They re-discover some stuff done 15 years ago and they re-brand it as a tremendous achievement of their own. When it is pointed out to them that there is a nearly identical precedent which they failed to acknowledge, they try to carefully weasel their way around it in an obscure “note added in print” instead of re-writing/retracting their paper.
Good old Nicolai Ivanovitch Lobachevsky! His method, it lives on!
Bozhe moi!
http://members.aol.com/quentncree/lehrer/lobachev.htm
“This paper has inappropriate amounts of overlap with the following papers also written by the authors or their collaborators.”
Uh oh. If they’re gonna start cracking down on this, it will jeapordize the physics community’s favored method of padding CVs and boosting citation counts. This is playing with fire.
I also agree with Tommaso that people of low moral standards occupy all niches of society. However, I think that choosing a career in scientific research is qualitatively different than choosing the path of politics, surgery, engineering, law,… It seems unlikely that most people can be truly successful in science without some kind of passion for the subject — there had to be something that made it initially interesting enough to go through the pain of graduate school and beyond. If I were trying to maximize success in terms of money, power, and popularity with the opposite sex, I don’t think I would choose science! Those kinds of rewards seem to come a little more automatically through some other career paths…
That is what what makes it surprising to me that prospective scientists would resort to outright plagiarism. In the long run, if someone is viewed as “successful” due to copied work, it seems probable that others will eventually find out their success is not genuine and all will come crashing down. In the meantime, the usual “rewards” for a huckster will not come nearly as readily as in other fields.
Like Peter, I am not actually convinced that what is needed is an automated system for detecting plagiarism. My point was that the problem of blatant plagiarism should be solvable in principle by such a system. Whether the problem is serious enough to warrant such a step is a different question.
The problem of how journals can reward or cajole referees so that they take the task seriously is also a different and difficult question. If a referee doesn’t do it out of a sense of professional responsibility or for other noble reasons, and the reward system within universities or labs is not in place to encourage it for less noble reasons, then short of outright payment for services it seems there aren’t a lot of good options. And pay-per-paper refereeing doesn’t seem likely to lead to lower journal costs…
Hi Tom,
Sure, there are “people of low moral standards everywhere”, but this is not just one guy who copied a paper, it looks like it was an infectious and spreading disease that apparently was considered to be a good idea for whatever reason. That’s why I am shocked. I mean, what is the next level? Pseudo-scientists trying to hack SPIRES and to push their citation level? Scientific terrorist attacks that delete gr-qc? Or, actually, the next logical step would be the computer code that produces finished papers that are not so obviously plagiarisms (along the lines of this paper recipe maybe?). I mean, people accuse me occasionally that I am too idealistic, but yes I admit I am troubled by people who willingly damage the field for no other reason than their immediate advantage (which btw I think is very shortsighted even for themselves).
Unlike Peter however, I don’t think the blame goes entirely to the journals. Enforcing a better peer review system is definitely going to help in this regard, but it’s curing the symptoms, not the cause. Ask what leads people to act this way. Remove their incentive. It’s being judged by number of publications, by quantity instead of quality, that is a trigger. It’s the glass wall that surrounds North America whether you realize it or not. It’s time pressure. It’s PUBLISH OR PERISH. It’s a society that values status (career! career! career!) over wisdom. It’s a community that punishes those that don’t fit into scheme A that causes outsiders to fake their selection criteria – it’s survival of the fittest, right?
Best,
B.
«Amos Dettonville Says:
August 23rd, 2007 at 11:27 am
I was once reading some papers in the physics arXiv on a subject of interest to me, and came across what struck me as a particularly lucid and insightful paper from someone at a University in Portugal.»…
Title of the paper please or even better, link in the arXiv.
Interesting.
Did it ever occur to anyone that the failure was much earlier…probably in high school? Does anyone think it is possible that “copy and paste” is a skill that first gets honed and rewarded in high school?
Yes, there are issues with the journals and the review system, but computers just by themselves have lowered the quality of education in more than a few areas. Copy and paste we have just seen. More insidious is the eroding of the knowledge base. The person who goes to the library and scours the books in the aisles for what he/she needs is forced to do some extra mental work and thereby assimilates more knowledge in the field. A computer search is too easy and you miss out on becoming familiar with the literature in your field.
Oh my. What is wrong with this “top” journals?
Most of even legitimate papers (meaning, not stolen) is so worthless – how can you honestly judge it? What’s the point of stealing bullshit?
This is all surreal. Thank God I escaped this cesspool.
-drl
When searching the arXiv for plagiarizes
http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/abs:+plagiarizes/0/1/0/all/0/1
one also gets a paper co-authored by Ginsparg himself
http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0702012
describing the plagiarism detection in arXiv. This is quite recent too.
I am not shocked at all by these events (though I am
smugly and undeservedly pleased that Phys. Rev. D, in
which I have been publishing as of late, is not on the list).
What I am amazed by is that the authors of the original
papers did not notice what was going on. Plagiarism is
an old story, and it’s gone on as long as there has been
literature. Here is what is stunning; none or few of the
victims seemed to have been aware of the crime. Had they
known, they would have alerted the faculty of this department
much sooner and it would not have got this far. This is a
new phenomenon.
I think what is going on is that theoretical high-energy
physics has become almost entirely literature-driven, as
opposed to idea-driven (for practical reasons, it is not
experiment-driven, at least not for another year or so).
As Milkshake noted above, people dress up old ideas
with new buzzwords and try to pass them off as original
work.
People are far more obsessed with producing papers on
trendy topics, and don’t care much about their ideas. If
the paper itself instead of its content is the desired
product, then no one cares if the content may be found
elsewhere.
Regarding LDMs comments:
“The person who goes to the library and scours the books in the aisles for what he/she needs is forced to do some extra mental work and thereby assimilates more knowledge in the field.” I think it’s a mixed bag. On the one hand, looking at bound journals in the library does require some extra thinking which can help understanding, but, partly because libraries only take a selection of the journals in a field and partly because its difficult to do more than follow author-supplied references in printed papers it can lead to following “the popular consensus” whilst the internet search does offer the opportunity of discovering a relevant search phrase in the body of a technical report ostensibly about a different subject that gives you another avenue. Being completely honest, back when my library did primarily take paper journals, the biggest advantage was that the library was in a building five minutes walk away which helped wake you during a mid-afternoon low-spot.
“A computer search is too easy and you miss out on becoming familiar with the literature in your field.” With the proliferation of publish opportunities, particularly in fields where conference publications are much closer to the leading edge than the eventual journal versions, is it really possible to become familiar with the literature just by going to a typical university library? I try and do a reasonable amount of reading, but I know that if I did “fully comprehensive” reading at current publication volumes I wouldn’t do any new research so I somewhat take a chance I may be unwittingly duplicating someone else’s work published in a minor journal. Of course, if it’s pointed out to me that I have duplicated some existing work then the work becomes “not novel”.
Is it just me, or did anyone else notice this:
prodigious track record of publication: over 40 papers in a 22-month span
No, that’s not “prodigious”. That’s comediarily impossible in theoretical physics. Why did anyone think for a moment that this was possible?
I’m a mathematician, not a physicist, but I do sort of agree with Peter Orland. If papers which were basically copies of my own were published in top mathematics journals, then I would definitely notice. Heck, I’d notice when they were posted on the ArXiV. Is this because people have essentially ceased to read the top physics journals?
To Arun: How was Lobachevsky ever involved in plagiarism (pace Lehrer’s song)?
But its very depressing to hear about the ‘po-mo’-isation of physics.
Perhaps, its because upto the early 20th c. those really interested in the sciences landed up doing it and now since there are so many more people competing for just about any profession one cares to name, the sciences has become just another job one chooses to do — not ready to put up with the grueling work hours of investment banking, well how about some condensed matter physics– but oops, how does one learn originality and creativity??!!
Marty suggested
Rien pointed out earlier in the comments that this is already being done on the arXiv.
I agree with Bee that it’s the publish-or-perish ideology that’s to blame here… we are becoming less like universities and more like corporate thinktanks.
Dear anon, corporate think tanks are generally expected to produce something useful, so they are subject to objective evaluation. That’s a big step up from academic “publish or perish”, where it’s the killing of trees that seems to matter most. 😉
D R Lunsford’s comment “Most of even legitimate papers (meaning, not stolen) is so worthless – how can you honestly judge it? What’s the point of stealing bullshit? This is all surreal. Thank God I escaped this cesspool.”
is one I tend to sympathize with…but really how many academics who’s careers have been built on this system would admit the same?
It should be clear by now that the “publish – or – perish” meme does not result in high quality. In fact, since quality by definition is harder to produce, it is clear that low quality papers will tend to be the norm.
It is time to kill the “publish – or – perish” meme. People who are passionate about science will still publish by virtue of their passion for science anyway — but they won’t be forced to produce what is essentially, in many cases, scientific waffle.
Well this isn’t good, but people shouldn’t get too carried away and draw overly generalized conclusions. As far as refereeing standards go, I think it’s important to distinguish between two classes of papers. The first consists of the papers which address issues of central importance to a subcommunity of sensible researchers. My impression is that refereeing standards are generally pretty good here (although everyone has a bad experience from time to time). The main complaint that could be made, I think, is that papers making too incremental advances are getting through. On the other hand, for the papers in the second class (which consists of all the papers not in the first class) refereeing can be very sloppy, even when the papers are submitted to supposedly top journals. For the simple reason that referees are loathed to invest time and effort in reading and evaluating papers that don’t interest them. Recommending publication is a quick and easy option; it can be quite a pain to reject a paper since then you will have to spend time dealing with the authors’ outraged rebuttal. Of course, a person may simply refuse to referee a paper that isn’t interesting to them, but then it will just get sent to other people, and if the paper belongs to the second class it can eventually happen that someone just waves it through or it ends up being refereed by a incompetent person.
This obviously isn’t a good situation, so what can be done about it? Well, as I’ve harped on about elsewhere I think we should take a look at how things are in the maths community. Probably the lesser maths journals are afflicted with problems similar to the physics ones, but on the other had it seems that the maths folks have been successful in maintaining high standards for their top journals. I doubt this is just because they are more conscientious than us. A mathematician who gets sent a paper to referee for Ann. Math. has a significant selfish motivation for doing a good and careful job: Her own high standing in the broader maths community comes in large part from having published papers herself in Ann Math and similar journals, so she will want to make sure those standards are maintained because if they slip then the prestige that she has derived from publishing there (and will derive from future publications) slips as well. Contrast this with the situation in physics (or at least h.e.p.): Someone who gets sent a paper to referee for, say, JHEP, has very little selfinterest in doing a good job – there is little prestige to be had from publishing in JHEP because the threshold for getting published there is not high. Your paper might make a major advance, but it is published side by side with others making small incremental advances and the occasional paper full of vacuous nonsense (yes I’ve seen them) or even containing plagiarism. So how is anyone to know the high quality of your paper just from the fact that it got published in JHEP? So you get almost no prestige from publishing in JHEP, and therefore have nothing personal at stake in keeping its standards high, hence no selfish motivation to do a good job with refereeing.
From these considerations an obvious solution would be to establish “high quality” journals in physics just like the mathematicians have. But this would require a major change of culture in physics. In physics, as far as I can tell, a person’s prestige and standing is derived not from where they have published, or how many papers they produced, but what clique they belong to. Of course within their own subfield the person’s standing will be determined by the actual work they have done, but when they are being evaluated by a dean and committee members from outside their field it will be their connections and the power of their senior supporters that count the most. In maths, as far as I can tell, publications in top journals can trump connections to powerful people, but not so in hep physics. Some outsider can publish in PRL until they are blue in the face but it won’t help them a shred when they are up in competition against the student of Nathan Seiberg or the postdoc of Joe Polchinski. The current situation suits the powers that be just fine, so I don’t foresee it changing anytime soon. But maybe if we heap enough scorn and contempt on them it might eventually have some effect.
My experience with alerting people to cases of plagiarism that they should know about (for example, pointing out to a supervisor that one of his students is into that) is that they just don’t want to hear about it. It’s too awkward and too much trouble to deal with. Unless of course the vicitim finds out and formally complains.
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Peter Orland said
“What I am amazed by is that the authors of the original
papers did not notice what was going on.”
As an author of one of the original papers I would like to respond to this. In my case a section of one of my papers gr-qc/9803014 was copied almost verbatim. This section was actually an introductory piece describing the equations of the L-T model which are very old. The rest of the paper they wrote was very different and was not taken from mine. If they had plagiarised my original ideas I would probably have noticed it, but I would not notice the copying a few standard equations and text unless I read every paper in the archive and have a very good memory for how I wrote things a few years ago.
I think they got away with it for so long because they were quite careful not to copy whole papers. I think it is their supervisors who should have become aware of it, assuming they were not complicit. The journal referees may also have a case to answer but I think you would have to check each paper in detail to see if there was really anything that they should have been suspicious of. At least we can be satisfied that the system of independent outside review for doctorates caught them out in the end.
Personally I am more concerned about cases of plagiarism where people copy an idea and rework it without giving credit to people who did similar work previously. These days there are many people who do research work and leave academia never to return. Later their ideas can become more relevant and someone else picks them up. Since the person left they may not follow the “reinvention” of their ideas and even if they do it is very difficult to point out their priority. For example the arxiv does not accept backtracks from outsiders.
It would be nice if something could be done about that.
Oh! Aristoteles!
Back to the middle ages, scholastic thinking!!
I worry about the future of the science in the developing countries..
Hardworking graduates start to work at the private enterprises and companies, a few prefer studying science academically..
Governments have to consider this situation carefully and try to plan and organize a logical application about science..
And who is responsible for finding competent referees, overseeing the editorial process, and taking a final decision on the basis of that process?
Let’s not forget that it is not referees who accept papers for publication, it’s editors who do. That’s precisely their job.
On the other hand, we do not know whether all of these plagiarized papers were actually refereed. Editors can, and often do, take editorial decisions without consulting referees.
Example when authors did found plagiat. I got reference few days ago. First paper is original and second is identical plagiat with only title changed.
1. Original: Optimization of ionic conductivity in doped ceria
David A. Andersson, Sergei I. Simak, Natalia V. Skorodumova, Igor A. Abrikosov, and Borje Johansson
3518–3521 PNAS March 7, 2006 vol. 103 no. 10
2. Plagiat: Determination of dopant of ceria system by density functional
theory K. Muthukkumaran ; Roshan Bokalawela ;
Tom Mathews 198; S. Selladurai
J Mater Sci (2007) 42:7461–7466
I’m impressed… I had never seen anything like that before. The entire paper is copied word by word and figure by figure.
@Matt Daws
No, that’s not “prodigious”. That’s comediarily impossible in theoretical physics. Why did anyone think for a moment that this was possible?
It’s not impossible. I know personally several people who have published about 20 papers per year over a period of several years. I don’t want to comment on the quality of these papers. Things like this however depend strongly on the field one is working in, and just counting items on the publication list doesn’t mean very much. To begin with, it’s quite common to take papers apart in the smallest possible bits that can be published separately – wouldn’t it be stupid if you didn’t, it’s like throwing away a paper for free.
Unfortunately, many funding agencies are not aware of that (or pretend to be not aware, or ignore the issue on purpose). See, there is the primary goal to fund good researchers. But this is not a useful prescription in many regards, it’s too vague and too complicated. Instead, there are some secondary requirements that have been worked out over the decades that indicate interesting research and that allows faster judgement. One is the number of publications.
However, the problem starts if people instead of aiming for the primary goal (good research) try to be ‘smart’ by targeting the secondary criteria (many publications) directly. That’s why I said above: remove the cause, not the symptoms – otherwise the problem will only reappear elsewhere. That is to say: rethink presently applied secondary criteria. Do they still satisfactory match with the primary goals?
Best,
B.
I think plagiat is really stupid thing at modern times. Too easy to discover and to prove. Which is not the case for pure fraud. How can referee decide if some experiments described in the paper were really performed or not? Or was result of computer simulation exactly that one as described ? In worst case author can admit some undeliberate errors and to publish corrigendum. Almost risk free if author wil not claim too much as did Hendrik Schön
To Phil the author of gr-qc/9803014 :
If they had plagiarised my original ideas I would probably have noticed it, but I would not notice the copying a few standard equations and text…
Just to make sure : so does their paper have an original contribution (which is non-trivial)?
anonym, are you asking if my paper gr-qc/9803014 has an original contribution or if the paper gr-qc/0607083 which plagiarised it has an original contribution? My one does, of course, but I will assume you are asking about gr-qc/0607083 🙂
Ok I have done some further checking with the help of google. The next paragraph after the one copied from mine turns out to be copied from gr-qc/0011087 which is about teleparallel gravity. I have had a quick read and I cant make much sense of gr-qc/0607083 overall. The L-T model which was copied from my paper is standard GR whereas teleparallel gravity is a generalisation with torsion. I dont see how these are being used consistently. Indeed I dont see the equations of the L-T model being used later on. I may be missing something but the paper looks like nonsense to me.
At least this one was not published.
I once witnessed a smallish plagiarism scandal first hand. Since then I am convinced that many plagiarists simply see nothing wrong in it because they have a completely different understanding of the system than we do. That explains the level of “stupidity”, or callousness, that is involved.
The case I am talking about is funny. A PhD student turns in a thesis. Large swaths of it are copied and mashed together from published papers – dig this – from his supervisor! It took a while for him to accept that there was any problem with this, and in fact was surprised that the supervisor didn’t find this flattering. From all I can tell, he never understood the problem to any level of depth. He just accepted it and tried to adapt (personally, I think the real scandal is that he got a second chance).
I am sure that for many plagiarists, a paper is nothing but a self-important swath of glibberish that bears names on it. It being published just means that the people named enjoy the favor of the gods, and thus are great. And being great is the purpose of life, isn’t it? They can’t, even if they have some technical chops, see anything but self-important drivel in any article they read, cannot imagine that anyone sees anything else, and essentially just want the favor of the gods. Plagiarism is just a side effect of wanting to play it risk free and use the same incantations that have worked before. You know, not everyone can come up with original glibberish that sounds right.
I agree with peter that it is a very bad sign when such approaches start to work too well.
Mr. Mustela,
Your characterization, which strikes me as completely on-target, describes the ultimate in cargo cult science.
Automated plagiarism detection does suggest a low-overhead solution for online papers—clearly flag the work as plagiarism, and leave it in place, with the “authors'” names. Provide canned queries on the relevant sites that list the plagiarized papers, and prominently identify and rank the plagiarists for their achievements…as plagiarists. They want recognition and notoriety? Fine, give ’em recognition and notoriety.
Of course, in practice some innocent people could be caught in the net. (Recall William Proxmire’s Golden Fleece Awards.)
Automated plagiarism detection does suggest a low-overhead solution for online papers…Of course, in practice some innocent people could be caught in the net.
Considering how many papers go online before publishing these days, it does at least seem that Journals should use automated plagiarism detection at least as a first pass. A good way to do this would be to run all submitted papers through a plagiarism detector first thing, and have anything that triggers the detector be simply punted to a human editor for review, just in case; since journals do not accept that many papers, they surely have the time to run a simple tool and filter out false positives by hand.
I actually kind of hesitate to even suggest something this simple; after all, I’d be shocked to learn they weren’t doing it this way already, as the same is widely done for, say, papers handed in for undergraduate classes. Looking at how many different journals this one group hit before they got caught, however, it looks like apparently they’re not doing it this way already…
Bee wrote:
I know what you mean, and it annoys me endlessly. I have tried a couple of times when I was refereeing papers like that to get editors to reject the paper on the grounds that it is just the Nth iteration of the same paper by the same authors. People just rerun their numerical codes with slightly different parameters and call that a paper.
But maybe the new anti-plagiarism system at arXiv will detect those papers too!
Plagiarism can have many different shades of gray and it isn’t always simply a case of cutting and pasting from someone’s paper. I had an experience a few years back of someone rederiving a result from one of my papers, supplementing it with a physical interpretation (which I had been aware of but didn’t consider interesting enough to mention) and then passing it off as entirely his own work (it got published in JHEP). He referred to my paper in a sentence “See Ref.[X] for related work”. It’s not so easy to know what to do in this situation; his rederivation and formulation of the result is presented quite differently to mine and it wouldn’t be obvious to others unless they invested a fair bit of time into checking the technical details. I have toyed on and off with the idea of writing a paper to point out that his paper and mine are not only “related” but are in fact essentially identical modulo some padding, but am loathed to take time out for this which I could be spending on real research.
klein4g,
Lobachevsky is the protagonist in Lehrer’s song because of the well known multiple discovery of noneuclidean (hyperbolic) geometry. Credit for this discovery, and for the later construction of specific models, is emphasized differently in different countries.