January 30, 2008

Journal Retracts Harvard Professor's Paper Flagged by Copycat-Search Tool

After two researchers warned last week that many examples of plagiarism may mar biomedical journals, a paper flagged by their search process has been retracted.

The Boston Globe reported yesterday that the journal Best Practice & Research Clinical Rheumatology had retracted a 2004 paper by Lee S. Simon, an associate clinical professor of medicine at Harvard University, because it contained overlapping text with a 2003 article in the journal Expert Opinion on Drug Safety.

The researchers who sounded the warning bell last week had found the paper through a search that turned up 70,000 copycat abstracts of biomedical papers. Dr. Simon’s abstract was one of more than 70 possible plagiarism cases they identified when they studied 2,600 abstracts individually. The researchers, who are at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, notified the journals and authors in several of those cases. The retraction appears to be the first result of their sleuthing.

The Texas researchers discovered that Dr. Simon’s paper, a review of arthritis treatments, contained entire pages of text that matched those of the earlier paper, which was by Roy Fleischmann, also of Texas Southwestern. Dr. Simon’s article did not cite the earlier paper. —Lila Guterman

Comments

1. I am curious…did they get busted by Turnitin.com?

   — history professor    Jan 30, 03:28 PM    #

2. No, it’s a faculty-developed program from UT Southwestern called eTBLAST

   — Eugene Jones    Jan 30, 03:57 PM    #

3. This is disgusting and it has to be stopped. I reviewed two book chapters during the semester break and suspected that they were plagiarised. I checked and they were.

   In our line of work, this is the equivalent of a police officer receiving payola, a fire inspector receiving bribes, an accountant cooking the books or the “everyday” activities of numerous politicians.

   — Eric L. Peters    Jan 30, 06:27 PM    #

4. Remember the important thing is tenure. A little dishonesty is a small price to pay….. Nice to know that things at the top of the pecking order are the same as things at the bottom, just a little worse.

   — Richard Tabor Greene    Jan 30, 07:22 PM    #

5. I wonder to what degree the academy may be complicit. As we are increasingly encouraged to make use of group projects (even group exams), to what degree do we insinuate to our students that making use of the work of others is OK?

   — Sally    Jan 31, 07:02 AM    #

6. Greene’s comments here are as beneath contempt as they are in his posting on the dismissal of the Georgia professor accused of harassment.

   — history professor    Jan 31, 07:39 AM    #

7. I wonder if the Chronicle could establish a “Plaigarism Watch” column to publicize incidents like this.

   I remember the first incident of deliberate plaigarism I encountered. I had published a well-received paper in Journal X. As a result, Journal Y invited me to its editorial board—and the first manuscript I received was a plaigairism of my own paper as published in X! I wish I had had a centralized venue to report this to. It would have made quite the impression, I think.

   — Mark E. Koltko-Rivera    Jan 31, 08:33 AM    #

8. Mark, not to be catty, but one clue to the plagiarism of your work would be the systematic misspelling of “plagiarism.”

   — Dan Kirklin    Jan 31, 09:03 AM    #

9. Not to be catty, Dan, but when someone says “not to be catty” they are about to be catty. I’m sorry. Was that catty?

   — CE    Jan 31, 12:23 PM    #

10. Grow-up, please

    — Not a Socialist, but a pragmatist    Jan 31, 03:10 PM    #

11. but remember Ward Churchill; charged with plagiarism for one of his essays, he revealed that he had also written the other one—but under another person’s name! (that’s in the investigative report by the Univ Colorado committee.)

    — historian    Feb 1, 12:25 AM    #

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