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Comment by cmontella | Hacker News Reader

This actually happened to my advisor when I was in gradschool. He gave an assignment to review a paper that he had written several years before, but had never published. One of the students decided to search for the title, to find similar papers. Lo and behold, she found a paper with the same exact title published in some obscure journal... curious.

Turns out it was the same exact paper. Well, almost. The plagiarizers made two changes: of course they made themselves authors, and they added several citations to papers they had written (or plgarized?).

The saddest thing about all this is that each of the plagiarizers were themselves holders of doctorate degrees. These were not grad students who didn't know any better (although a grad student should know better), but full tenured professors!

I can't think of a better example of how the reward system in academia skews scientific progress.

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I don't understand why you would do such a thing. When I was at university, plagiarism of any form was considered the most grievous sin possible. Ripping off someone else's research and actually publishing it under your own name would be career suicide.

It could be something to do with the culture of the specific institute where they worked (somewhere in southern Italy), rather than the culture of the whole academia in general. I remember Derek Lowe talking about this on his blog quite a bit in relation to typical excuses that plagiarists give.

This varies a lot by country, unfortunately.

It should be career suicide, but I'm assuming that because people do it there's a good chance of getting away with it. I'm just speculating though.

Did they face any consequences?

Yes and no. They were reported and basically blacklisted from the journal with a retraction. However, there are thousands of journals just as disreputable as the one they published in, and the level of egregiousness here makes me thing that plagiarism isn't such a big deal where they are from, so it's unclear that this will ruin their careers.

what is disreputable about the journal they were published in?

The fact that this got published when the work was already searchable verbatim on the internet tells me that the review process was virtually nonexistent. Searching prior work is pretty much the first thing I do as a reviewer.

Well, in this particular example at least the plagiarism apparently advanced the public good: some unpublished research got published.

Unless it was unpublished for good reasons, such as flaws in the methodology or data surfacing before it was submitted. Perhaps that's why the Prof was using it as an example for students to review? In which case, the public good would have been seriously harmed.

It was unpublished basically because it wasn't that interesting, and couldn't make its way into a top-tier journal. However, it was published as a technical report through the university, so others could find it with the right keywords.

That's kind of a naive viewpoint-if the research was bunk (flawed methodologies, bad justifications, etc.) then it should definitely go unpublished. Publishing all research doesn't fix idiocracy because idiots will latch onto any small scrap of evidence that supports their viewpoint, and if you publish garbage someone will start waving it around as if it were On the Origin of Species, claiming that their viewpoint must be valid because one study said so.

your idea has an interesting parallel in econ/finance: trading on inside information (misnomer: insider trading) has the economic effect of moving the prices of securities in the direction they're supposed to go, which is a public good. Stock markets are meant to "crowd source" a price which accurately predicts the future value, and illegal trades by insiders do that precisely, move the price of the security toward its new equilibrium.

If you hold the market portfolio (i.e. invest in a broadly diversified market index ETF, as you in most cases "should") this impacts you by helping you more accurately assess your current postion and make more knowledgeable trades like "sell some now and buy a house" or "retire". Before you object to that, remember these effects occur on margin (econ, not finance)

You have to wonder how wide spread this practice was before search engines.

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