Scan Uncovers Thousands of Copycat Scientific Articles | Hacker News Reader

Scan Uncovers Thousands of Copycat Scientific Articles

scientificamerican.com

11 pointsdxjones2 comments

A growing number of professors use Turnitin.com to catch students submitting plagiarized papers.

Now the professors themselves are being scrutinized for plagiarism when submitting papers to scientific journals:

From "Science": Déjà vu, an online database that bills itself as "a study of scientific publication ethics," has prompted discussions with journal editors and at least 48 retractions of suspicious papers. Some journals now run accepted papers through eTBLAST, the freely available software behind the database, to hunt for duplications prior to publication.

links:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/324/5930/1004

http://invention.swmed.edu/etblast/etblast.shtml

Open articleView on HN

This is the worst bit:

  He added that he was being singled out for a paper that 
  was a chore to write and brought him no added prestige. 
  "Who cares? This is a review article," he says. "I'm 
  never going to write another one, because of this
  bullshit."

Review articles are invaluable, at least in my field. Collecting results that are disparate in time and space not only saves other researchers time, but the process of arranging the article often clarifies the presentation. (N.B. this probably only applies to theory-oriented fields.)

And it "brought him no added prestige"? It must have been pretty bad if no one noticed...

From the description it sounds like it was a copy & paste of the original articles without citation, that's pretty much the definition of plagarism. The review author should either summarize the findings in their own words, or copy it and give an appropriate citation.

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