Plagiarism in high energy physics

[Yllanes]

A couple of graduate students in Turkey have published the incredible number of 40 papers in 22 months in high energy physics, many of them in top journals (like the Journal of High Energy Physics). Regrettably, they were all plagiarised, they just cut and pasted big chunks of other papers and added an introduction. Read it here, and here for a blog discussion. Some people in the comments mention even stupider cases, like a student who resubmitted two papers exactly as they were, just changing the title and author (this one, however, didn't get them published). What does this say about peer review and the refereeing process? I would say that not much, as Paul Ginsparg says in the article I linked:

rofessor Paul Ginsparg at Cornell, who helped establish the arXiv, suggests that the impact will be minor. Because the fraudulent work was necessarily so derivative, it did not have a high profile or influence. "There's little effect on science," Dr. Ginsparg said, "since the people who produce high quality work don't need to plagiarize, and the people who do need to plagiarize don't produce high enough quality work to affect anything."

In any case, this is a major embarrasment to the implied journal (not so much the individual referees, who many times have to work on articles about topics they don't know much about and are certainly overworked).

 

[John Hewitt]

A couple of graduate students in Turkey have published the incredible number of 40 papers in 22 months in high energy physics, many of them in top journals (like the Journal of High Energy Physics). Regrettably, they were all plagiarised, they just cut and pasted big chunks of other papers and added an introduction. Read it here, and here for a blog discussion. Some people in the comments mention even stupider cases, like a student who resubmitted two papers exactly as they were, just changing the title and author (this one, however, didn't get them published). What does this say about peer review and the refereeing process? I would say that not much, as Paul Ginsparg says in the article I linked:



In any case, this is a major embarrasment to the implied journal (not so much the individual referees, who many times have to work on articles about topics they don't know much about and are certainly overworked).

Yes, this is the kind of report that makes me rather cynical. It isn't what is reported here, this kind of thing has been reported a number of times in the biomedical literature, as even a causal perusal of Broad and Wade's "Betrayers of the Truth" would demonstrate. Its the sanguine comments comments that annoy me. Everything is alright really -

Because the fraudulent work was necessarily so derivative, it did not have a high profile or influence. "There's little effect on science," Dr. Ginsparg said, "since the people who produce high quality work don't need to plagiarize, and the people who do need to plagiarize don't produce high enough quality work to affect anything."

What rubbish! So, a few kids, whose English is so poor they daren't paraphrase are caught in the act of plagiarism. That's bad, I agree. However, there are lots of people out there whose English is just fine and who copy ideas without copying words.
Sometimes its the professor who does it the junior's who are the victim. Unfortunately, there never seem to be any high level expressions of outrage at those times. What one sees instead is a closing of ranks and a systematic cover up.

 

[CapelDodger]

A couple of graduate students in Turkey have published the incredible number of 40 papers in 22 months in high energy physics, many of them in top journals (like the Journal of High Energy Physics). Regrettably, they were all plagiarised, they just cut and pasted big chunks of other papers and added an introduction.

And got caught, as I understand it. Forty papers in twenty-two months is going to attract some attention, after all.

Read it here, and here for a blog discussion. Some people in the comments mention even stupider cases, like a student who resubmitted two papers exactly as they were, just changing the title and author (this one, however, didn't get them published).

So your point is what, exactly? That blog discussions are often vapid? If so, I'm down with that.

What does this say about peer review and the refereeing process? I would say that not much, as Paul Ginsparg says in the article I linked:

In any case, this is a major embarrasment to the implied journal (not so much the individual referees, who many times have to work on articles about topics they don't know much about and are certainly overworked).

Why would somebody be a referee on a subject they're not familiar with? That's a rather bizarre notion. As to being over-worked, most of the academics I know show no evidence of such stress.

 

[Beausoleil]

The system works - they were caught.

The purpose of reviewers is to weed out as many flaws as possible, but they can't be expected to be infallible or all-knowing. The fact that something has passed review and been published cannot guarantee that it is not plagiarised, nor that it is correct.

Journals are called "peer reviewed" because your peers read them and there is an ongoing process of appraisal of what is published in them. The name doesn't just refer to the review process before publication.

 

[Yllanes]

Why would somebody be a referee on a subject they're not familiar with? That's a rather bizarre notion. As to being over-worked, most of the academics I know show no evidence of such stress.

I'm talking about very specific subjects. Like it or not, the contents of some papers sometimes are really understood by very few people. Sometimes physicists receive for review papers that are not too related to their own work. And sometimes they just put something together for a review or restrict themselves to correcting typos, etc. This happens, as anyone who has submitted papers to journals knows.

Anyway, I'm not blaming the reviewers, as I said earlier. They can't be responsible for things like plagiarism.

The system works - they were caught.

After managing to get published. I get the impression that the replies are being a bit defensive, I'm not in any way criticising the process itself, but there are a few things to think about. For example:

• Doesn't it seem odd to anybody that none of the original authors noticed? One would think they would read the literature of their subject.
• It is no secret that in theoretical physics some fields are somewhat stuck and some people advance through the path of least resistance, without much regard for reality. This kind of event illustrates this, because sometimes researches limit themselves to repackaging older results with new buzzwords. In my opinion this is not such big a deal, because this kind of low quality work has no real impact. However, the fat that such low quality research gets published in top journals could be seen as a bad sign for the field (because the only reason they got away with it for a while was that the papers were not interesting enough to be read). There's certainly room for discussion.

Note: I am a theoretical physicist myself, so this is self criticism in some sense.

 

[Tez]

A reviewer cannot be expected to know everything that has been published on the topic. If it was completely copied from correct papers, then it is likely correct itself, and so its probably going to pass review.

I work in several fields. In each field there are about 10 papers per day put onto the internet arxiv I should read. However, I peruse abstracts of only about 20 papers per day, and at most print off 1 or 2 to read. So, like everyone else, I have to rely on the fact that good papers will swim (I'll hear about them from others, see conference talks on them, see them cited multiple times etc) and bad papers will sink.

I could easily see myself recommending publication of a completely plagiarized paper, if I had not read the original. Reviewing is not like marking homework, you're not looking for copying per se.

That said, I did catch some Korean scientists completely plagiarizing some Japanese ones once. It was just a fluke that I caught them. The journal of course refused to publish it, but there is no way to really ensure serious repercussions for the parties involved, which is somewhat frustrating...

 

[BlackKat]

My father got (to peer review for publication) a paper by a graduate student once. He was reading it and trying to figure out why it seemed so familiar. Then it struck him... it was his paper he wrote when he was in grad school and lifted almost word for word from the copy in the library.