4 ms·

At least one aspect of the peer review process should be better now than in 1982, when the paper was published: resubmission detection. Detecting plagiarism see

by piokuc 13y ago

At least one aspect of the peer review process should be better now than in 1982, when the paper was published: resubmission detection. Detecting plagiarism seems easy these days, just google for "detect plagiarism". But are reviewers actually using these tools? It would be interesting to repeat the resubmission experiment and see the results.

edtechdev 13y ago
Hard to detect plagiarism when the original article is behind a paywall of another publisher
- piokuc 13y ago
  True, to some extend, but see the comment by gcr: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5781899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5781899
- gcr 13y ago
  Many publishers allow Google to crawl the full text of the protected resources. This is why Google Scholar works, for example. Copy+pasting the abstract into Google Scholar is surprisingly effective at finding plagiarism.
gcr 13y ago
Absolutely. Every reviewer that I've met does plagiarism detection on their own. My advisor has even found instances where the author copy+pasted articles from the likes of the Wikipedia article on the subject or 'about.com'; such papers get desk-rejected without review, and in some cases, the author is forbidden from submitting to IEEE conferences for the rest of their career. That's how important plagiarism is. Just copy+pasting the abstract into Google is often enough to find it. At least for computer science conferences, the conference organizers run the papers through additional plagiarism screening tools before publishing, but it's mostly the reviewers' job.
- leephillips 13y ago
  "Every reviewer that I've met does plagiarism detection on their own." I don't think it's a bad idea, but it never occurred to me to do this. If you're familiar with the field in which you are reviewing papers, you'll know if something is not new, in which case it is rejected, quite aside from the possibility of the author having lifted some actual text.
  - gcr 13y ago
    Sure, but plagiarism is more than just trying to publish an old idea. One paper was of something novel, but in their background section, they just copied a paragraph or two from an older article. That's the no-no.
    - leephillips 13y ago
      You're right, my comment was not thoroughly considered. Maybe I should start doing some of this plagiarism detection. For some reason the idea depresses me, but you make a good case for it.
MrQuincle 13y ago
They do act actually. Plagiarized paper I found: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1688334&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D1688334 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=16...
- MrQuincle 13y ago
  Correction again. Apparently the IEEE takes action if I EXPLICITLY say which paper does copy which other paper. But here the same author is copying - including pictures - another paper again: Search on Google scholar: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=1,5&as_ylo=2000&as_vis=1&q=%22This+process+is+defined+as+binding+process.+In+The+immune+system%22 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=1,5&a... Do I really have to write IEEE for all violations? http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/searchresult.jsp?searchWithin=p_Authors:.QT.Ki-Won%20Yeom.QT.&searchWithin=p_Author_Ids:37588116600&newsearch=true http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/searchresult.jsp?searchWit... It's just searching for certain phrases in the text. In this case the first one I tried "This process is defined as binding process. In The immune system" was already enough! And it's sad.
sampo 13y ago
I just recently received a review of my paper, and it came with a pdf-report of which text fragments match a database of previous publications and the internet, made by some software called iThenticate. So clearly the journal now has a policy to automatically run this test for every submitted manuscript. I haven't seen this before, so maybe that is getting more common these years now.

by piokuc 13y ago

edtechdev 13y ago

Hard to detect plagiarism when the original article is behind a paywall of another publisher

piokuc 13y ago
True, to some extend, but see the comment by gcr: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5781899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5781899
gcr 13y ago
Many publishers allow Google to crawl the full text of the protected resources. This is why Google Scholar works, for example. Copy+pasting the abstract into Google Scholar is surprisingly effective at finding plagiarism.

gcr 13y ago

Absolutely. Every reviewer that I've met does plagiarism detection on their own. My advisor has even found instances where the author copy+pasted articles from the likes of the Wikipedia article on the subject or 'about.com'; such papers get desk-rejected without review, and in some cases, the author is forbidden from submitting to IEEE conferences for the rest of their career. That's how important plagiarism is. Just copy+pasting the abstract into Google is often enough to find it. At least for computer science conferences, the conference organizers run the papers through additional plagiarism screening tools before publishing, but it's mostly the reviewers' job.

leephillips 13y ago
"Every reviewer that I've met does plagiarism detection on their own." I don't think it's a bad idea, but it never occurred to me to do this. If you're familiar with the field in which you are reviewing papers, you'll know if something is not new, in which case it is rejected, quite aside from the possibility of the author having lifted some actual text.
- gcr 13y ago
  Sure, but plagiarism is more than just trying to publish an old idea. One paper was of something novel, but in their background section, they just copied a paragraph or two from an older article. That's the no-no.
  - leephillips 13y ago
    You're right, my comment was not thoroughly considered. Maybe I should start doing some of this plagiarism detection. For some reason the idea depresses me, but you make a good case for it.

MrQuincle 13y ago

They do act actually. Plagiarized paper I found: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1688334&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D1688334 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=16...

MrQuincle 13y ago
Correction again. Apparently the IEEE takes action if I EXPLICITLY say which paper does copy which other paper. But here the same author is copying - including pictures - another paper again: Search on Google scholar: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=1,5&as_ylo=2000&as_vis=1&q=%22This+process+is+defined+as+binding+process.+In+The+immune+system%22 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=1,5&a... Do I really have to write IEEE for all violations? http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/searchresult.jsp?searchWithin=p_Authors:.QT.Ki-Won%20Yeom.QT.&searchWithin=p_Author_Ids:37588116600&newsearch=true http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/searchresult.jsp?searchWit... It's just searching for certain phrases in the text. In this case the first one I tried "This process is defined as binding process. In The immune system" was already enough! And it's sad.

sampo 13y ago

I just recently received a review of my paper, and it came with a pdf-report of which text fragments match a database of previous publications and the internet, made by some software called iThenticate. So clearly the journal now has a policy to automatically run this test for every submitted manuscript. I haven't seen this before, so maybe that is getting more common these years now.