

Scan Uncovers Thousands of Copycat Scientific Articles - dxjones
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=thousands-of-copycat-articles
A growing number of professors use Turnitin.com to catch students submitting plagiarized papers.<p>Now the professors themselves are being scrutinized for plagiarism when submitting papers to scientific journals:<p>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.<p>links:<p>http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/324/5930/1004<p>http://invention.swmed.edu/etblast/etblast.shtml
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mgreenbe
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...

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ig1
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.

