Plagiarism Pandemic
(February 25th 2008) Well, who hasn't done it? Who's never copied a best friend's beautiful unicorn in kindergarden or "borrowed" a classroom neighbour's math homework? What for children is a venial sin, is for scientists an unpardonable offence called plagiarism. In science, as the number of published articles continues to rise so does the instance of theft, as reported by Melanie Estrella.
Publish or perish is the dictum of science. A publication is the scientific currency that can be traded for research grants. The battle for resources is tough and not always fair. Some of the combatants do not mind publishing their precious results complete or in parts more than just once, others even help themselves to publications produced by others.
A recent case of bold plagiarism appalled the scientific community: An Epub ahead of print by Mohamad Warda from Cairo University of Giza in Egypt and Jin Han from the Inje University of Busan in Korea from January 23rd in the accredited journal
Proteomics oddly titled "Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul: Proteomic prospective evidence" , which was a review of mitochondria that contained extensive passages lifted from others.
Paul Myers, associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota posted a commentary on the paper in his blog
Pharyngula , kicking off an outrage among scientists that finally led to the retraction of the article. "The retraction has been agreed due a substantial overlap of the content of this article with previously published articles in other journals. Proteomics apologizes to our readership", it reads on the corresponding journal's webpage.
Since the original article has been withdrawn, sources such as Myers's blog and others need to be referenced in order to investigate the lapses of the authors. In addition to copying about four pages of material, which is quite a substantial overlap, references are cited in wrong context and strange assertions were made that were not further proved, as Myers sums up on his site. While the lack of detection of blatant plagiarism is troubling enough, even more suspect are several interspersed sections in the paper which betray the composers as creationists, inviting speculation as to how this piece could ever pass the initial peer review process.
In details: A "more realistic alternative" to the endosymbiosis theory is proposed by the authors to be a "mighty creator". Warda and Han conclude "that mitochondria could be the link between the body and this preserved wisdom of the soul devoted to guaranteeing life". Well, biomedical science is without doubt a complex matter. However, nobody seriously involved in this field with a lucid mind would ever dare to point to a mysterious almighty character as being responsible for seemingly inextricable activities inside the cell in a review article. Instead, people taking their investigative profession seriously would redouble their efforts and find the answer. After all, that's what it's all about.
It would be ambitious effort to enhance the search for plagiarism in science, as Mounir Errami and Harold Garner of the University of Texas found out. Searching through 62,000 abstracts indexed in Medline, and applying the free online available text-similarity program eTBLAST, they found 421 potential duplicates, as they report in the January 24th, 2008 edition of
Nature. Based on their findings, the authors advise journals to rely not only on common sense during the review process, but also to use software tools to identify at least a portion of the dishonourable duplicates.
Students already learn the hard way that copy and paste is not always the best shortcut to graduation: for teachers in schools and universities searching for plagiarism the old fashioned way and with the aid of computer programs is standard practice. Thus, what holds true for students should be understood as obligatory for established scientists as well.
