Journalology roundup #13 - plagiarism special

Policing plagiarism. "The internet has made both copying other people's work and detecting plagiarism much easier. Michael Cross looks at some of the tools used to tackle plagiarism".

Plagiarism and punishment. "Plagiarism is one of the three high crimes of research fraud. The US Office for Research Integrity (ORI) puts it up there with the big boys, fabrication and falsification, in its definition of research misconduct (http://ori.dhhs.gov). Some have argued that the definition should extend to lesser crimes such as undeclared conflict of interest and duplicate publication, but to my knowledge no one has questioned that theft of another person's work is fraud".

Plagiarism? No, we're just borrowing better English. "The accusations made by arXiv that my colleagues and I have plagiarized the works of others, reported in your News story 'Turkish physicists face accusations of plagiarism' (Nature 449, 8; doi:10.1038/449008b 2007) are upsetting and unfair. It's inappropriate to single out my colleagues and myself on this issue. For those of us whose mother tongue is not English, using beautiful sentences from other studies on the same subject in our introductions is not unusual".

University drops case against Croatian academic accused of plagiarism. "A senior Croatian academic and obstetrician has escaped punishment over allegations of plagiarism in his published work by Zagreb University's "court of honour" because the alleged offences took place some years ago and he retired in August. The allegations against Asim Kurjak were originally made in the BMJ by Iain Chalmers of the James Lind Library in Oxford last year".

Is There an Effective Approach to Deterring Students from Plagiarizing? "The students from 2004/2005 were warned that their essays would be examined by plagiarism detection software and that those who had plagiarized would be penalized. Students from 2004/2005 plagiarized significantly less of their essays than students from the previous two groups".