(Press-News.org) As scientific researchers become evermore competitive for scarce funding, scientific journals are increasing efforts to identify submissions that plagiarize the work of others. Still, it may take years to identify and retract the plagiarized papers and give credit to the actual researchers.
"We need a better system," said Harold Garner, executive director of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech. Garner discussed the problem and solution in a Comment in the January 4, 2012 issue of Nature and in a January 19, 2012 radio interview with NPR's Leonard Lopate.
Garner, creator of eTBLAST plagiarism detection software, identified numerous instances of wholesale plagiarism among citations in MEDLINE. "When my colleagues and I introduced an automated process to spot similar citations in MEDLINE, we uncovered more than 150 suspected cases of plagiarism in March, 2009.
"Subsequent ethics investigations resulted in 56 retractions within a few months. However, as of November 2011, 12 (20 percent) of those "retracted" papers are still not so tagged in PubMed. Another two were labeled with errata that point to a website warning the papers are "duplicate" -- but more than 95 percent of the text was identical, with no similar co-authors."
But even when plagiarism is uncovered, it does not guarantee that the plagiarized articles will be retracted. In Garner's study, as noted in his Nature commentary, "Three of the 56 retracted papers are cited in books, including one citation after the retraction. Another eight were cited in other PubMed Central archived articles before retraction, and seven were cited after retraction."
Some researchers say plagiarism has become a pandemic in many large institutions and schools, and that there is an entire industry built on the business of copying the work of others for the purpose of developing theses content and technical papers.
Quelling the proliferation of scientific plagiarism by identifying and retracting plagiarized articles is not the only issue. Publication editors and researchers must agree on the definition of plagiarism as noted in Nature.
Said Garner, "Ultimately, plagiarism comes down to human judgment, similar to other questionable practices -- you know it when you see it."
###
The Comment in Nature appears here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v481/n7379/full/481021a.html#/harold-garner-flag-plagiarized-studies
Watch Garner here: http://youtu.be/cuAjUqNF-R8
Garner also was featured in an interview with NPR's Leonard Lopate of WNYC, January 19, 2012. Lopate investigated with Garner the prevalence and problems presented by plagiarism of scientific and medical literature, and discussed ways that new detection software can help to identify plagiarized materials and encourage publication editors to retract these articles.
Listen to the interview: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/2012/jan/
About the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute
The Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech is a premier bioinformatics, computational biology, and systems biology research facility that uses transdisciplinary approaches to science, combining information technology, biology, and medicine. These approaches are used to interpret and apply vast amounts of biological data generated from basic research to some of today's key challenges in the biomedical, environmental, and agricultural sciences.
With more than 320 highly trained multidisciplinary, international personnel, research at the institute involves collaboration in diverse disciplines such as mathematics, computer science, biology, plant pathology, biochemistry, systems biology, statistics, economics, synthetic biology, and medicine. The large amounts of data generated by this approach are analyzed and interpreted to create new knowledge that is disseminated to the world's scientific, governmental, and wider communities.
END
Research involving scientists at The University of Nottingham has taken us a step closer to breeding hardier crops that can better adapt to different environmental conditions and fight off attack from parasites.
In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), the researchers have shown that they can alter root growth in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, or thale cress, by controlling an important regulatory protein.
Dr Ive De Smet, a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) David ...
New Rochelle, NY, January 24, 2012—The time for commercial development of gene therapy has come. Patients with diseases treatable and curable with gene therapy deserve access to the technology, which has demonstrated both its effectiveness and feasibility, says James Wilson, MD, PhD, Editor-in-Chief of Human Gene Therapy in a provocative commentary and accompanying videocast. Human Gene Therapy and Human Gene Therapy (HGT) Methods are peer-reviewed journals published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc..
Until recently, gene therapy has been reserved for severe diseases with few ...
San Diego – Cytori Therapeutics (NASDAQ: CYTX) announced today the publication of previously reported six-month outcomes from APOLLO, the Company's European clinical trial evaluating adipose-derived stem and regenerative cells (ADRCs) in patients with acute myocardial infarction (heart attack or AMI), as Research Correspondence in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The APOLLO trial was a 14-patient, prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, feasibility trial (Phase I/IIA) evaluating autologous ADRCs extracted with the Company's proprietary ...
A molecule embedded in the membrane of human liver cells that aids in cholesterol absorption also allows the entry of hepatitis C virus, the first step in hepatitis C infection, according to research at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine.
The cholesterol receptor offers a promising new target for anti-viral therapy, for which an approved drug may already exist, say the researchers, whose findings were reported online in advance of publication in Nature Medicine.
An estimated 4.1 million Americans are infected with hepatitis C virus, or HCV, which ...
RIVERSIDE, Calif. – In August 2010, an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside discovered a tiny fairyfly wasp in upstate New York that had never been seen in the United States until then. Nearly exactly a year later, he discovered the wasp in Irvine, Calif., strongly suggesting that the wasp is well established in the country.
Called Gonatocerus ater, the wasp is about 1 millimeter long and arrived in North America from Europe. It lays its eggs inside the eggs of leafhoppers.
Leafhopper females lay their eggs inside plant tissue. Gonatocerus ater ...
Hampton Inn Atlanta-Southlake Morrow GA Hotel offers affordable accommodations to participants and guests attending the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions. Taking place at Clayton State University's Spivey Hall, the auditions will be held on Sunday, February 5, 2012. At the event, outstanding young vocalists from North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia will sing opera arias before a panel of expert judges, competing to advance to the national finals on stage at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Tickets are $35 and can be purchased through Spivey ...
Sheraton Atlanta Perimeter North / Dunwoody Hotel, located at Atlanta Perimeter Center, announces a new special savings package for travelers to enjoy. Guests who register for the SPG Better by the Night promotion can earn unlimited bonus Starpoints even faster. With every stay from January 9 through April 8, 2012, at this property and over 750 other participating hotels and resorts worldwide, guests earn double Starpoints on two-night stays and triple Starpoints on stays of three nights or longer.
Register by March 15, 2012, and then book your stays to begin earning ...
Researchers have found a genetic variation predisposing children to six-times greater risk of developing metabolic syndrome when taking second-generation anti-psychotic medications. Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of conditions that are risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The study showed a close association with two conditions in particular: high blood pressure and elevated fasting blood sugar levels, which is a precursor to diabetes. The research is published today in the medical research journal Translational Psychiatry.
"This is the first report of an underlying ...
RIVERSIDE, Calif. – A research team led by physicists at the University of California, Riverside has identified a property of "bilayer graphene" (BLG) that the researchers say is analogous to finding the Higgs boson in particle physics.
Graphene, nature's thinnest elastic material, is a one-atom thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. Because of graphene's planar and chicken wire-like structure, sheets of it lend themselves well to stacking.
BLG is formed when two graphene sheets are stacked in a special manner. Like graphene, BLG has high current-carrying ...
COLUMBUS, Ohio – On any given weekend, at least 10 percent of students at a single college could be hosting a party, and on average, party hosts who live off campus are drinking more and engaging in more alcohol-related problem behaviors than are the students attending their bashes, research suggests.
In contrast, hosts of parties held on campus tend to drink less than do the students attending their gatherings, according to the study.
The research also suggests that college party hosts are more likely than the students attending parties to be male, living off campus, ...
