
Letter to a Peer Reviewer Who Stole and Published Our Manuscript as His Own - soneca
http://annals.org/aim/article/2592773/dear-plagiarist-letter-peer-reviewer-who-stole-published-our-manuscript#.WFARLHs9Z_U.twitter
======
cmontella
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.

~~~
taneq
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.

~~~
conistonwater
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.

------
jonchang
It may be instructive to read the Editor in Chief's piece as well as the
Retraction Watch commentary. Of interest is that the plagiarized piece
fabricated wholesale a study population, making the published results
incorrect and possibly dangerous.

[http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-
misconduct-...](http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-misconduct-
hurts)

[http://retractionwatch.com/2016/12/12/dear-peer-reviewer-
sto...](http://retractionwatch.com/2016/12/12/dear-peer-reviewer-stole-paper-
authors-worst-nightmare/)

~~~
kkirsche
I don't understand that article :/ could it be explained in layman terms

~~~
detaro
Could you ask specific questions? The second link seems to lay out the issues
quite clearly to me, so I'm not sure where to start with a better explanation.

~~~
eganist
Sounds more like the poster is seeking a summary in simplified terms.

Specific to your point: if a person truly failed to understand the entirety of
an article, I'm not entirely certain asking for specific questions will help
as the person may not have a reference point upon which to build with answers
to specific questions. Does that make sense?

~~~
callalex
I've spent enough time in support to realize that people's questions also
convey their current thoughts and understanding even when they don't state it
explicitly :).

------
mdturnerphys
A few years ago I got an alert from Google Scholar asking me to confirm
ownership of a recently published paper. Given how common my last name is, I
got a lot of false matches, and the paper wasn't mine. The title, however, was
similar to my undergrad research, so I took a look. Turns out that the paper
was a slightly edited plagiarism of my undergrad thesis, on which I'd been
credited as second author.

I emailed the first "author", the chair of the department listed as his
affiliation, and the editor of the journal. The individual responded, and
after some back and forth he claimed that he'd wanted to collaborate with me
and had worked on reformatting the paper, but had not meant for it to go to
print. The department chair said that they hadn't seen him since he'd
graduated a five years previous. The editor said they'd take a look.

Finding that one's work has been plagiarized is frustrating, but dealing with
the journal was even more so. They quickly acknowledged that the paper was
plagiarism (by running a tool that checks against some corpus--why don't they
always do this?) and had me approve a retraction statement. However, it took
me sending a DMCA takedown notice and copying the publisher's general counsel
on the email to actually get it posted. It then became clear that they had no
intention of taking the paper off their website. Their reasoning was that
their Code of Ethics precluded them from removing a retracted paper. A couple
more emails to the general counsel pointing out that their Code of Ethics did
not trump copyright law and a stated intention to seek legal representation
finally got things sorted. I'm still not sure whether the plagiarism or the
retraction notice went to print--I've been unable to get a hard copy of the
journal issue.

I also demanded that the journal send me the referee reports, which they did
after some insistence (and me pointing out that I was listed as an author).
They also sent the response from the submitter. One of the reviewers was very
concerned as to why previously published work was being submitted. In
response, the individual moved some paragraphs around and made some claims
about focusing on different parts of the research.

The individual later contacted me after the retraction notice started causing
some problems for him, hoping that I could somehow make it go away. He
admitted that he knowingly submitted the paper. He needed a paper in my area
to help him change fields, and included my name because he intended to also
include my name on some of his own work to make up for plagiarizing mine. If
he hadn't done that he would have gotten away with it :(

------
dekhn
I've had R01 proposals turned down, then seen the same proposal, lightly
reworded, submitted by a person who was on my study section, the next year,
get funded.

that's when I knew it was time to get out of academia.

~~~
kem
I had a rejected journal submission show up again as a keynote conference
presentation a couple of years later. To be fair, with that sort of thing we
could have just had the exact same ideas and so forth, but it wasn't a common
research topic, and there were suggestive dots easy enough to connect.
Regardless, it raised all sorts of alarms about what might have actually
happened, and I started thinking seriously about the value of non-peer-
reviewed, completely open publishing just as a way of maintaining authorship
credit. Even if everything were totally innocent, it was a bit unnerving about
the attribution of ideas and everything.

I'm having major conflicts about academics as a career. It seems to get more
and more insane every day.

~~~
rebuilder
So proof of original authorship is a big issue in academia? You could easily
create timestamped proof of having created a particular document, so is the
issue more an insitutional one? Pardon me if I make sense, I'm a complete
outsider to this.

~~~
ldjb
That would rely on everybody creating timestamped proof, otherwise you could
claim ownership of any paper that hasn't been timestamped by timestamping it
yourself.

Not all cases are clear-cut, especially where a plagiariser restructures the
document, changes the wording, sources, etc..

So I don't think this is a problem that can be solved practically, or even
theoretically. But there are certainly things that can be done to better
counter plagiarism.

~~~
whiteandnerdy
You could post a hash of the paper to a trusted host like Twitter at the point
you submit it, and you could then refer to that for proof of authorship and
priority at a future date.

~~~
ldjb
You could, however what happens if an author does not post a hash? If I found
someone else's paper without a hash, I could generate a hash of my own and
claim authorship.

This idea would only work if everybody started securing some form of proof of
authorship before sharing papers with anyone, which I don't quite see
happening.

------
devin
What about the plagiarist's other contributions? Will there be any additional
investigation into whether or not those papers were his own?

I found it a bit puzzling that the plagiarist's name was not mentioned,
although it is easy to find from the links provided in the article. Why the
professional courtesy in light of such an egregious violation of same?

Edit to add: The second link in the comment by jonchang answers my question.
Though, I don't fully agree. It ought to serve as a warning to those would-be
plagiarists that if they are caught, there will be real professional
consequences.

In addition, the verbosity of the retraction is a bit annoying.

> As corresponding author I ask for retraction of our article Finelli et al.
> (2016[1]) with the consent of all co-authors, because of unauthorized
> reproduction of confidential content of another manuscript. The data in the
> retracted article actually are from a cohort of patients from the Boston, MA
> enrolled in a trial registered in ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT02454127. We deeply
> regret these circumstances and apologize to the scientific community.

"unauthorized reproduction of confidential content of another manuscript" and
"The data in the retracted article actually are from a cohort of patients
from..." ought to read: "This manuscript was plagiarized, and the data
falsified."

~~~
brazzledazzle
The author was interviewed[0] about it and this was his reasoning:

"I'm not looking to 'tattle' on the perpetrator — doing so starts to look like
revenge rather than achieving the more important objectives, and may even draw
attention away from those objectives."

[0] [https://www.statnews.com/2016/12/12/plagiarist-study-
science...](https://www.statnews.com/2016/12/12/plagiarist-study-science/)

~~~
conistonwater
> _I 'm not looking to 'tattle' on the perpetrator — doing so starts to look
> like revenge_

I do not fully understand this reasoning myself. Is this a common sentiment?
That calling out perpetrators by name is counterproductive? Is it specific to
some culture? I've never heard it expressed directly.

~~~
aaron695
This is western culture.

For starters if you fuck up, you might ruin an innocent persons life, and in
turn, hopefully they will sue you into the ground and ruin yours.

Did the authors listed actually submit the paper. Are all the authors
complicit? Were there different levels of complicity? Was the Journal
involved? Were the reviewers involved?

By just stating the facts the case is made and humanity hopefully moves
forward reducing errors and less lives ruined.

Add to this, do you think a person who is at their wits end deserves to be
taken down.

They might be just about to lose their house and position at there university
and this was their last desperate ditched attempt.

Their harm to the original author really was minimal, if anything at all.
(Plus they got an extra citation out of it)

Would you as a human not feel guilty if they killed themselves after you went
to the extra effort of outing them and you realized just how bad a shape they
were to do what they did?

What if they we in a manic state at the time, and the internet now turns on
them and makes them and their families life a further living hell?

Western culture is mostly about about moving things forward, not revenge for
revenges sake. Most decent people in the west try and practice this.

~~~
gkya
I upvoted this comment for the content but there's nothing here specific to
the western culture, it's just how a decent person behaves anywhere in the
world.

~~~
kobeya
It is not a cultural universal, unfortunately.

------
DanielleMolloy
Interesting. More context: [http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-
misconduct-...](http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-misconduct-
hurts)

Can anybody form an idea of the motivations behind such open misconduct? It is
always very puzzling when people from the science community (which you usually
don't enter without being intelligent and idealistic) get into such clearly
wrong behaviour.

Another case that left me very puzzled (and terrified, regarding how long he
got a away with this without someone asking questions - he basically shaped a
scientific field):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel)

~~~
sliken
Many research papers are so obscure that approximately zero people site them.
Yet if you are a tenured professor it's publish or perish and there are often
significant incentives. I suspect most of them would have gotten away with it
if they changed the title a bit.

There are also sometimes incentives for when your paper is cited, thus citing
your own papers... even if they were stolen as well.

~~~
peteretep

        > I suspect most of them
        > would have gotten away
        > with it if they changed
        > the title a bit
    

Cosine similarity over a corpus of published papers to find very similar ones
would be an interesting exercise

------
fred_is_fred
Here's a good explanation of the whole story:

[http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-
misconduct-...](http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-misconduct-
hurts)

For some reason it didnt load without me going into incognito mode, probably
adblock related.

------
matheusmoreira
I wonder if submitting a pre-print to a site such as arXiv could prevent this.
At the very least, it'd serve as evidence that the article existed before
being republished by the plagiarizer, making the fraud painfully obvious.

~~~
sooheon
There's also the proof of existence[1]. But none of these really matter
because the issue is not proving you were first, it's becoming aware of the
plagiarism in the first place. The plagiarists are relying purely on security
through obscurity--their cases would fall apart immediately upon discovery
anyways.

[1]: [https://proofofexistence.com/about](https://proofofexistence.com/about)

~~~
matheusmoreira
Now I wonder how many people did this and got away with it.

There's a study¹ that determined the fate of 350 manuscripts rejected by the
Annals of Internal Medicine. They found that 69% of them were eventually
published in another journal. 70% of those were published in more specialized
journals with lower impact factor.

It appears the reviewer took a similar approach. The manuscripts were
published between 121 and 1792 days after rejection, with a mean of 552 days.
The letter to the plagiarist says the article was published "a few months
later" so that would be approximately 90 to 120 days?

¹
[http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0002-9343(00)00450-2](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0002-9343\(00\)00450-2)

------
makecheck
Since Copy and Paste is too easy and compute power is now ubiquitous, there
need to be new rules that include generated data within publications:
something constructed via computer from secret keys, that can be verified.
(The minimum key size or other complexity measure would be required to
increase over time, as always, to guard against easy cracking.)

The hard part is coming up with something that can’t be just as easily
replicated. If somebody is already willing to just copy an entire paper and
change only the author’s name, they could just as easily “re-publish” with
their own key in a crypto system and you have the same problem of original
attribution (sure it’s “signed” now, by the plagiarizer!).

The real problem in security is tracking time: how do you reliably know that
event A preceded event B? In theory, you need a trusted time value, such that
you can go to a server at any time and check it. For instance, a server where:
given a value, it returns the time when the value was first recorded (ever-
increasing). The value could be derived from content (e.g. hash of your entire
paper, incorporating your own key).

------
et2o
Does anyone doubt this happens frequently in less egregious terms? Especially
in computational fields, it's extremely easy to copy the idea of a paper with
your own dataset.

At least it doesn't matter that much in my chosen field; if I get scooped, I
just write up another project and keep going. If you're doing lengthy clinical
trials or bench research, it's a much more difficult situation sadly.

------
p4bl0
This kind of situation would be avoided by open peer review or at least
overlay journals. One more reason to go the open access route.

------
jest7325
I believe there are times when you can also learn from others' mistakes. I
remember the book The count of Monte Cristo and it's about a long and slow
revenge. I hope your story will have a good ending!

------
type0
This is such a disturbing thing, it almost makes one to loose all the hopes on
academia.

------
MidnightRaver
How very Italian.

------
kkirsche
I don't have the context here to understand what's going on by I feel bad for
the author that their work was plagiarized. With that said, why didn't the
author have a signed legal NDA in regards to the document?

~~~
robotresearcher
Academic reviewers don't sign NDAs. We are working for free, as a community
service. There's no way we'd accept legal restrictions on future speech in the
process.

Copyright law provides legal remedies for plagiarism.

~~~
kkirsche
How is reviewing a research paper a community service? I don't mean that
sarcastically but realistically medical journals specifically like in this
article are commonly not free, thus I'm hard pressed to understand how this is
a community service. An NDA would simply restrict you from discussing it prior
to the authors publishing of it as I see it.

~~~
robotresearcher
> How is reviewing a research paper a community service?

Traditionally we are neither offered nor would accept payment for technical
paper reviews to avoid any suggestion of bias. Since someone reviews my papers
too, I get roughly the same value of work back in-kind.

We are bound by academic integrity to not discuss reviews, unpublished work,
or the identity of any reviewer. This is a very strong norm.

On NDAs generally: if your entire job is based saying what you think, you
avoid signing anything that restricts your ability to do that.

~~~
privong
> Since someone reviews my papers too, I get roughly the same value of work
> back in-kind.

I've heard of journals that are loosely codifying this by saying they may
refuse submissions from authors who serially refuse to review manuscripts. I
don't know how prevalent it is overall, though.

------
known
Methods of preventing plagiarism

"Planning your paper:

    
    
        Consult with your instructor
        plan your paper
        take effective notes
    

Writing your paper:

    
    
        when in doubt, cite sources.
        make it clear who said what
        know how to paraphrase
        analyze and evaluate your sources"[39]
    

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism)

------
x1798DE
This is obviously an insane thing do (most fields are small enough that you
will expect at least one person from the original paper to at least read the
plagiarized paper), but this seems untrue:

> As you must certainly know, stealing is wrong. It is especially problematic
> in scientific research. The peer-review process depends on the ethical
> behavior of reviewers.

That people get proper credit is less important in scientific research than
elsewhere, not more. It's obviously bad incentives, but with science it's most
important that the information is accurate and gets out. Doesn't sound like
the guy made it less accurate by republishing it with his own name on it.

I also find the "open letter" tone here a bit annoying and petulant. If this
guy admitted what he did, why publish this without mentioning his name, and
with just general platitudes like this? No one is on the side of someone who
does this.

EDIT: Maybe I was unclear here, my last paragraph was intended to to indicate
that no one would be on the side of the plagiarizers, and that I didn't like
the indirect "you can figure out who we are talking about" nature of the
letter. I think it would have been more effective to write this as, "Recently
our work was stolen by such-and-such, we think it was terrible, etc."

~~~
MaysonL
I wonder how the "co-authors" feel about getting smeared with the plagiarism
brush by the guy who did it? Did they have any foreknowledge of their names
being attached to the stolen article?

~~~
detaro
Publishing something in someones name would probably be possible, but
_another_ similarly bad offense. If they knew their name was on that paper,
they either knew or had no business having their name on it.

