12 ms·

Letter to a Peer Reviewer Who Stole and Published Our Manuscript as His Own

176 points by soneca 10y ago

kkirsche 10y ago
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?
- dpark 10y ago
  Do you imagine that someone willing to blatantly steal a research paper and publish it as his own would be deterred by an NDA? Also an author does not have contact or control over peer reviewers and typically no way to demand an NDA.
  - kkirsche 10y ago
    Deterred? No. But I do think it would add valuable ammunition for legal repercussions.
    - wbhart 10y ago
      It's not at all difficult to prove copyright infringement of a paper submitted for peer review. The editors will have a copy of the paper and its submission will be date stamped in the peer review submission system. That's simply not the issue here. What happened is the reviewer submitted substantially the same manuscript to another journal, hoping no one would notice. The difficulty isn't in remedying or proving copyright infringement, but noticing it!
    - robotresearcher 10y ago
      The publisher has already sent the original author a formal receipt for the manuscript, and a keeps a dated copy of the letter to the plagiarist asking for a review. This has been standard practice for a couple of hundred years, and is well understood legally.
- lucasmullens 10y ago
  Isn't stealing it like this illegal anyway, without an NDA?
  - kkirsche 10y ago
    Do you have sufficient proof to show in court that you developed it and wrote it prior? I view an NDA as one more layer of proof that it's yours in that battle
    - jonchang 10y ago
      I do not think you know how the scientific peer review process works. The manuscript will generally get sent to the editor of the journal through their submission system, with the corresponding electronic trail. Most manuscripts are also written with coauthors who can attest to their own personal contribution. Recommend you read this for a primer on how peer review works: http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/howscienceworks_16 http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/howscienceworks_16
      - kkirsche 10y ago
        While I admit I don't I can't say that trust in a system that leverages trust in peers is a valid excuse for being passive bystanders when more concrete actions should be taken to prevent further damages.
        wbhart 10y ago
        There's about a thousand different ways the authors could prove they did the work. Many are listed in the actual post. Unless you did all the work yourself, didn't apply for a grant for it, kept all your work quiet from your colleagues and institution, didn't hire anyone for the project, didn't request materials from your institution, didn't have coauthors, sent it to an editor with a bad memory, didn't use the proper submission system, didn't back the files up and lost your computer, didn't send preprints to any of your friends or colleagues, and the editor reviewed it themselves without sending it to anyone else, you aren't going to have the slightest difficulty proving it is your own work. On the flip side, the plagiarist isn't going to be able to do any of that.
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
    - jonchang 10y ago
      Peer review does not happen in a vacuum. If you do not review my manuscript, who will review your manuscript when you submit it? Scientists are generally encouraged to complete a review for every review they receive. Reviewers are generally not paid. > medical journals specifically like in this article are commonly not free Yes, this is one of the biggest issues in scientific publishing today. I don't believe there are any easy solutions, just trade-offs (absent governments nationalizing scientific publishers and returning control to universities)
    - ctrl-j 10y ago
      > medical journals specifically like in this article are commonly not free Generally speaking - peer-reviewers are not employees of, nor get compensated by, academic journals. The journal being free or paid has no bearing on the review process.
    - dbcooper 10y ago
      Researchers provide peer review services to journals free of charge.
    - detaro 10y ago
      It's a community service in that you are not paid for it and don't have work contract requiring you to do it. It's something everybody does a bit.
- jonchang 10y ago
  During the scientific peer review process reviewers are generally agree to keep the process confidential and are usually bound by codes of professional ethics, e.g., http://publicationethics.org/files/Peer%20review%20guidelines_0.pdf http://publicationethics.org/files/Peer%20review%20guideline...
  - kkirsche 10y ago
    I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for sharing. I'll have to look into it more
- Motse 10y ago
  Final edition (Master document) Business address and the Board (Vd) Printing: Public resources (?) South African new chapter 9 Agency
x1798DE 10y ago
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."
- detaro 10y ago
  The names are at the bottom, in the references. EDIT: I think the important part of your quote is The peer-review process depends on the ethical behavior of reviewers.. For better or worse, the formal peer review is central to the current scientific process in most fields. Reviewers are incredibly strong gatekeepers, if they can't be trusted that's a big problem. So maybe sort-of thanks to those guys for pointing out yet another flaw with it? EDIT2: and as /u/jonchang pointed out above, the plagiarizers actually made up data, which is even worse.
  - deleted 10y ago
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- jonchang 10y ago
  This seems straightforward, but, > 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. If you reward the people who plagiarize over the people who actually did the work, there is no more motivation to do the work and the scientific endeavor as a whole suffers.
jonchang 10y ago
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-hurts http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-misconduct-... http://retractionwatch.com/2016/12/12/dear-peer-reviewer-stole-paper-authors-worst-nightmare/ http://retractionwatch.com/2016/12/12/dear-peer-reviewer-sto...
- kkirsche 10y ago
  I don't understand that article :/ could it be explained in layman terms
  - detaro 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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?
      - detaro 10y ago
        It does, but I didn't want to blindly rephrase the article in some way and then missing the point that was the issue. Thus me asking instead of ignoring it completely. I didn't phrase the question very well though.
      - callalex 10y ago
        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 :).
fred_is_fred 10y ago
Here's a good explanation of the whole story: http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-misconduct-hurts http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-misconduct-... For some reason it didnt load without me going into incognito mode, probably adblock related.
deleted 10y ago
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gleventhal 10y ago
Came here for the shit-talking.
- deleted 10y ago
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cmontella 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
  - bzbarsky 10y ago
    This varies a lot by country, unfortunately.
  - dasboth 10y ago
    It should be career suicide, but I'm assuming that because people do it there's a good chance of getting away with it. I'm just speculating though.
- 10y ago
DanielleMolloy 10y ago
Interesting. More context: http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-misconduct-hurts http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-misconduct-... 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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    > 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
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  It's quite a stretch but perhaps they really believed in the research and didn't want it to fade into obscurity. Or an even bigger stretch: Perhaps there's a perception that American study populations aren't sufficiently reflective of Europeans so the goal was to make sure that what they thought was very valuable data couldn't be dismissed out of hand.
- algesten 10y ago
  I think the notion that the scientific community is mostly "intelligent and idealistic" is a stretch. The commercial pressures are as intense there (if not more?), as everywhere else in society. I also think this has given rise to a mentality where it's socially acceptable to "get away" with as much as possible. If you can do a big tax dodge and get away with, why not? If you can secure a great schooling for your kids by paying under the table for private tutors, why not? If you can have your house cleaned cheaply by a non-registered immigrant, why not? This mentality permeates all parts of our culture, and in academia with the "publish or perish" pressure, I could easily see why you would try to pass off someone else's work as your own. It's sad times all around.
p4bl0 10y ago
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.
type0 10y ago
This is such a disturbing thing, it almost makes one to loose all the hopes on academia.
devin 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    > 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.
    - BuuQu9hu 10y ago
dekhn 10y ago
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.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  That's pretty audacious. Did you confront them?
  - dekhn 10y ago
    no, b/c they were pretty senior scientists and I was just getting my career started. I think that would have been career suicide.
- protomyth 10y ago
  Happens with government proposals also. I was told about a school who had it happen to them in the 90's. A Senator was informed and instead of raising all sorts of hell, the Senator basically received assurance the the school would score well on a lot of future grant proposals. Governments are made of fallible people after all.
- SubiculumCode 10y ago
  This may have happened, but this is not typical behavior in science, and is hardly evidence that people should 'get out of academia'.
  - neuromantik8086 10y ago
    It's not typical, but it's not particularly atypical either. Science is one of those fields where (especially now with the publish or perish mentality) YMMV greatly. Good labs are awesome, bad labs can break you, similar to most other human endeavors. Unfortunately, I tend to be more swayed towards believing that bad labs are more common nowadays than in the past.
- cmdrfred 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
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matheusmoreira 10y ago
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.
- mnglkhn2 10y ago
  These services usually have confirmation emails. His emails have timestamps from the moment they were sent into the review process. Also, his original docs are also time stamped.
- sooheon 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  This is pretty common in my area (theory / algorithms), but mostly to prove that you were the first to come up with something, in case someone else beats you to the punch while your paper is under review. It also provides open access and the opportunity to go beyond the space limits of conference proceedings (practically all work is published at conferences). This means you can show proofs etc in more detail, or present more detailed experiments, etc. I really like this way of going about things. Tons of stuff is available to anyone, conferences provide great opportunities to exchange ideas and see what others are working on, and journals don't have the enormous power they enjoy in other disciplines.
makecheck 10y ago
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).
- deleted 10y ago
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known 10y ago
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
et2o 10y ago
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.
mdturnerphys 10y ago
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 :(
MidnightRaver 10y ago
How very Italian.
jest7325 10y ago
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!

176 points by soneca 10y ago

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?

dpark 10y ago
Do you imagine that someone willing to blatantly steal a research paper and publish it as his own would be deterred by an NDA? Also an author does not have contact or control over peer reviewers and typically no way to demand an NDA.
- kkirsche 10y ago
  Deterred? No. But I do think it would add valuable ammunition for legal repercussions.
  - wbhart 10y ago
    It's not at all difficult to prove copyright infringement of a paper submitted for peer review. The editors will have a copy of the paper and its submission will be date stamped in the peer review submission system. That's simply not the issue here. What happened is the reviewer submitted substantially the same manuscript to another journal, hoping no one would notice. The difficulty isn't in remedying or proving copyright infringement, but noticing it!
  - robotresearcher 10y ago
    The publisher has already sent the original author a formal receipt for the manuscript, and a keeps a dated copy of the letter to the plagiarist asking for a review. This has been standard practice for a couple of hundred years, and is well understood legally.
lucasmullens 10y ago
Isn't stealing it like this illegal anyway, without an NDA?
- kkirsche 10y ago
  Do you have sufficient proof to show in court that you developed it and wrote it prior? I view an NDA as one more layer of proof that it's yours in that battle
  - jonchang 10y ago
    I do not think you know how the scientific peer review process works. The manuscript will generally get sent to the editor of the journal through their submission system, with the corresponding electronic trail. Most manuscripts are also written with coauthors who can attest to their own personal contribution. Recommend you read this for a primer on how peer review works: http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/howscienceworks_16 http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/howscienceworks_16
    - kkirsche 10y ago
      While I admit I don't I can't say that trust in a system that leverages trust in peers is a valid excuse for being passive bystanders when more concrete actions should be taken to prevent further damages.
      - wbhart 10y ago
        There's about a thousand different ways the authors could prove they did the work. Many are listed in the actual post. Unless you did all the work yourself, didn't apply for a grant for it, kept all your work quiet from your colleagues and institution, didn't hire anyone for the project, didn't request materials from your institution, didn't have coauthors, sent it to an editor with a bad memory, didn't use the proper submission system, didn't back the files up and lost your computer, didn't send preprints to any of your friends or colleagues, and the editor reviewed it themselves without sending it to anyone else, you aren't going to have the slightest difficulty proving it is your own work. On the flip side, the plagiarist isn't going to be able to do any of that.
robotresearcher 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
  - jonchang 10y ago
    Peer review does not happen in a vacuum. If you do not review my manuscript, who will review your manuscript when you submit it? Scientists are generally encouraged to complete a review for every review they receive. Reviewers are generally not paid. > medical journals specifically like in this article are commonly not free Yes, this is one of the biggest issues in scientific publishing today. I don't believe there are any easy solutions, just trade-offs (absent governments nationalizing scientific publishers and returning control to universities)
  - ctrl-j 10y ago
    > medical journals specifically like in this article are commonly not free Generally speaking - peer-reviewers are not employees of, nor get compensated by, academic journals. The journal being free or paid has no bearing on the review process.
  - dbcooper 10y ago
    Researchers provide peer review services to journals free of charge.
  - detaro 10y ago
    It's a community service in that you are not paid for it and don't have work contract requiring you to do it. It's something everybody does a bit.
jonchang 10y ago
During the scientific peer review process reviewers are generally agree to keep the process confidential and are usually bound by codes of professional ethics, e.g., http://publicationethics.org/files/Peer%20review%20guidelines_0.pdf http://publicationethics.org/files/Peer%20review%20guideline...
- kkirsche 10y ago
  I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for sharing. I'll have to look into it more
Motse 10y ago
Final edition (Master document) Business address and the Board (Vd) Printing: Public resources (?) South African new chapter 9 Agency

x1798DE 10y ago

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."

detaro 10y ago
The names are at the bottom, in the references. EDIT: I think the important part of your quote is The peer-review process depends on the ethical behavior of reviewers.. For better or worse, the formal peer review is central to the current scientific process in most fields. Reviewers are incredibly strong gatekeepers, if they can't be trusted that's a big problem. So maybe sort-of thanks to those guys for pointing out yet another flaw with it? EDIT2: and as /u/jonchang pointed out above, the plagiarizers actually made up data, which is even worse.
- deleted 10y ago
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jonchang 10y ago
This seems straightforward, but, > 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. If you reward the people who plagiarize over the people who actually did the work, there is no more motivation to do the work and the scientific endeavor as a whole suffers.

jonchang 10y ago

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-hurts http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-misconduct-... http://retractionwatch.com/2016/12/12/dear-peer-reviewer-stole-paper-authors-worst-nightmare/ http://retractionwatch.com/2016/12/12/dear-peer-reviewer-sto...

kkirsche 10y ago
I don't understand that article :/ could it be explained in layman terms
- detaro 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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?
    - detaro 10y ago
      It does, but I didn't want to blindly rephrase the article in some way and then missing the point that was the issue. Thus me asking instead of ignoring it completely. I didn't phrase the question very well though.
    - callalex 10y ago
      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 :).

fred_is_fred 10y ago

Here's a good explanation of the whole story: http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-misconduct-hurts http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-misconduct-... For some reason it didnt load without me going into incognito mode, probably adblock related.

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gleventhal 10y ago

Came here for the shit-talking.

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cmontella 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
- bzbarsky 10y ago
  This varies a lot by country, unfortunately.
- dasboth 10y ago
  It should be career suicide, but I'm assuming that because people do it there's a good chance of getting away with it. I'm just speculating though.
10y ago

DanielleMolloy 10y ago

Interesting. More context: http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-misconduct-hurts http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-misconduct-... 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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > 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
brazzledazzle 10y ago
It's quite a stretch but perhaps they really believed in the research and didn't want it to fade into obscurity. Or an even bigger stretch: Perhaps there's a perception that American study populations aren't sufficiently reflective of Europeans so the goal was to make sure that what they thought was very valuable data couldn't be dismissed out of hand.
algesten 10y ago
I think the notion that the scientific community is mostly "intelligent and idealistic" is a stretch. The commercial pressures are as intense there (if not more?), as everywhere else in society. I also think this has given rise to a mentality where it's socially acceptable to "get away" with as much as possible. If you can do a big tax dodge and get away with, why not? If you can secure a great schooling for your kids by paying under the table for private tutors, why not? If you can have your house cleaned cheaply by a non-registered immigrant, why not? This mentality permeates all parts of our culture, and in academia with the "publish or perish" pressure, I could easily see why you would try to pass off someone else's work as your own. It's sad times all around.

p4bl0 10y ago

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.

type0 10y ago

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

devin 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > 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.
  - BuuQu9hu 10y ago

dekhn 10y ago

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.

brazzledazzle 10y ago
That's pretty audacious. Did you confront them?
- dekhn 10y ago
  no, b/c they were pretty senior scientists and I was just getting my career started. I think that would have been career suicide.
protomyth 10y ago
Happens with government proposals also. I was told about a school who had it happen to them in the 90's. A Senator was informed and instead of raising all sorts of hell, the Senator basically received assurance the the school would score well on a lot of future grant proposals. Governments are made of fallible people after all.
SubiculumCode 10y ago
This may have happened, but this is not typical behavior in science, and is hardly evidence that people should 'get out of academia'.
- neuromantik8086 10y ago
  It's not typical, but it's not particularly atypical either. Science is one of those fields where (especially now with the publish or perish mentality) YMMV greatly. Good labs are awesome, bad labs can break you, similar to most other human endeavors. Unfortunately, I tend to be more swayed towards believing that bad labs are more common nowadays than in the past.
cmdrfred 10y ago

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matheusmoreira 10y ago

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.

mnglkhn2 10y ago
These services usually have confirmation emails. His emails have timestamps from the moment they were sent into the review process. Also, his original docs are also time stamped.
sooheon 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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
lorenzhs 10y ago
This is pretty common in my area (theory / algorithms), but mostly to prove that you were the first to come up with something, in case someone else beats you to the punch while your paper is under review. It also provides open access and the opportunity to go beyond the space limits of conference proceedings (practically all work is published at conferences). This means you can show proofs etc in more detail, or present more detailed experiments, etc. I really like this way of going about things. Tons of stuff is available to anyone, conferences provide great opportunities to exchange ideas and see what others are working on, and journals don't have the enormous power they enjoy in other disciplines.

makecheck 10y ago

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).

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known 10y ago

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

et2o 10y ago

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.

mdturnerphys 10y ago

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 :(

MidnightRaver 10y ago

How very Italian.

jest7325 10y ago

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!