Self-plagiarism alert: A very similar version of this post is being published online in Anesthesiology News, where one of us (AM) is managing editor.
If a plagiarist plagiarizes from an author who herself has plagiarized, do we call it a wash and go for a beer?
That scenario is precisely what Steven L. Shafer found himself facing recently. Shafer, editor-in-chief of Anesthesia & Analgesia (A&A), learned that authors of a 2008 case report in his publication had lifted two-and-a-half paragraphs of text from a 2004 paper published in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia.
A contrite retraction letter, which appears in the December issue of A&A, from the lead author, Sushma Bhatnagar, of New Delhi, India, called the plagiarism “unintended” and apologized for the incident. Straightforward enough.
But then things get sticky. Amazingly, the December issue of A&A also retracts a 2010 manuscript by Turkish researchers who, according to Shafer, plagiarized from at least five other published papers—one of which happens to have been a 2008 article by Bhatnagar in the Journal of Palliative Medicine. Shafer told Retraction Watch:
Dr. Bhatnagar’s paper in Anesthesia & Analgesia was retracted because it contained text taken from a paper by Dr. Munir. However, Dr. Bhatnagar’s paper in the Journal of Palliative Medicine is one of the source journals for the plagiarism by Dr. Memis. To give you an idea how widespread this is, we recently rejected a paper that copied large blocks for text from a paper by Dr. Memis.
As farcical as the case of merry-go-round cheating might be at first blush, journal editors are far from amused by the episode and similar incidents. Shafer, for example, estimates that he spends up to one-third of his time dealing with lifted text or, less commonly, fraudulent presentations of data in manuscripts. He still devotes several hours each week to sorting out the aftermath of the Scott Reuben fiasco—a sweeping case of data fabrication that led to the retraction of 21 papers, 11 of which appeared in A&A. He expects the fallout to linger for years.
Shafer said his journal is now running every submitted manuscript through CrossCheck, a copy-checking system that allows editors and publishers to screen papers for signs of plagiarism. A&A, through its publisher Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, belongs to a consortium called CrossRef, one of whose goals is to prevent misuse of previously published material using CrossCheck, which screens manuscripts against a database of articles in order to detect possible plagiarism.
Robert Creutz, general manager of iThenticate, which makes the software that powers CrossCheck, said the plagiarism catcher now has access to some 50,000 titles and 28 million published articles. “We can generally evaluate a manuscript in anywhere from 45 seconds to three minutes,” Creutz said.
Individual customers pay $1,000 per year for 500 pages of checking. Members of the CrossRef consortium have a different arrangement. They pay 75 cents per manuscript (under 25,000 words) but earned the discount by agreeing to provide iThenticate with access to thousands of papers upfront as seed for the database.
“I’m seeing a lot of journals overseas that are taking advantage of the technology,” Creutz said. The motivation appears to be competing with established journals and improving impact factor, he added.
Shafer said that since his journal began screening manuscripts routinely for signs of plagiarism, he has identified about a dozen papers with unacceptable amounts of verbatim text from other sources. That’s a rate of approximately 1 in 10 submissions to A&A, he said.
Authors for whom English is not their native language may inadvertently commit plagiarism , Shafer said.
I am very sympathetic to the challenges faced by investigators struggling to write a scientific paper in an unfamiliar language. However, I have no choice but to retract papers that contain plagiarized text, even if it is only a single paragraph, and even if the intent was simply to express an idea in proper scientific English.
And it’s not only non-English speakers:
I have identified unacceptable amounts of copied verbatim text from major US academic institutions, personal friends of mine, and even from papers submitted by Editors-in-Chief of well-respected journals.
The UK journal Anaesthesia has been using CrossCheck to screen every manuscript it receives, according to editor-in-chief Steven M. Yentis. In a recent editorial, Yentis said his journal publication rejected 4% of submitted manuscripts in 2010 because the software turned up evidence of plagiarism.
So how common are retractions from the anesthesia literature in particular? Yentis looked at this question last June, and came up with the following numbers: 26 from the eight leading titles in the specialty dating back to 1993. Of those, 16 (62%) involved papers on which Reuben was a co-author.
The tally does not include the retraction in the December issue of A&A of an article by German researcher Joachim Boldt and colleagues. It does, however, include a retraction in Anaesthesia—evidently the first ever by the title—of a paper on the safety of cardiac surgery without transfusions in Jehova’s Witnesses.
According to the retraction notice:
the study did not have ethical approval as claimed. In addition, the article was written and submitted without the knowledge or consent
of three of the four authors, who agreed to the retraction.
It has not been possible to obtain a response from the corresponding author…
As if to add insult to the injury of forgery, that author evidently misspelled the surname of one of his unwitting collaborators.
By the way, there’s yet another retraction in Anesthesia & Analgesia this month, not for plagiarism per se, unless you want to call it self-plagiarism:
We request retraction of the article “Balloon Dilatational Tracheostomy: Initial Experience with the Ciaglia Blue Dolphin Method.” This paper is a translation of a manuscript we published in German. Following publication in the highly esteemed German journal Der Chirug, we thought our experience would be valuable to English speaking physicians. However, we failed to inform Anesthesia & Analgesia that this was a translation of our previously published article, and we did not seek permission from Der Chirurg to publish a translation. We regret the error.
When it rains, it pours.
I am totally NOT surprised. Many years ago (in the days of typewriters) I was editing a major surgical textbook. I had three chapters submitted from three different institutions that all plagiarized the same half dozen paragraphs from a fourth source. The abashed senior authors blamed the junior authors (mostly fellows and residents). But that habit of stealing text was out of control already then, and things are worse now because it’s easier to cut and paste.
I think copying sentences and paragraphs is common for many so-called scientists. Anyway, is it legal to copy paragraphs from one’s own previous publications and re-use them, e.g. in “Discussion”? I’ve seen this, too.
Many scientists do self-plagiarize and think that they should be able to do so, but in most cases, it technically violates copyright held by the journal publishing the previous study. At most journals, authors sign copyright permissions over to the publisher and are not supposed to reproduce text or figures elsewhere without permission. American Chemical Society journals (and I suspect others) do make exceptions for re-using your own work in dissertations, reviews, conferences, and web pages with appropriate citations. Issue regarding intro/discussion text is that no one cites it as reproduction/quote as this is generally frowned upon in scientific literature.
I find this post interesting.However,unintentional plagiarism should be viewed a little differently when it is committed by someone who does not use English as a first language. I am not trying to justify the practise but merely to highlight a problem. People who are not comfortable with the language fear “losing the meaning” and hence “cut and paste” important bits. As such it should be viewed as a “language issue” rather than an “integrity issue”. It is difficult to solve this problem.
The funny thing is that not all journals are this serious when dealing with verbatim -plagiarized- text. I have the feeling that in most cases it depends very much on how “famous” is the last name on the paper. That is what seems to make the difference among retraction or simple corrigendum. I would be happy to be proven wrong.
There’s clearly a moral difference between plagiarising text that someone else wrote, in a write-up of work which is genuinely yours, and plagiarizing the actual study and passing it off as your own, which is clearly just fraud.
If I found that someone had been copying and pasting from my papers to help beef up their own Introduction or Discussion, I’d be annoyed, but especially if English was not their first languuage, it would be forgiveable. Certainly there are many worst crimes.
I will admit I am still a bot unclear on how much language can be identical in METHODS sections, especially f you I do cite the original source mine or someone else’s work)–there are only so many ways to say “was diluted to 10 micrograms per ml and stored at -70 degrees Celsius …”