On Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:22:12 -0800, Stuart McKelvie wrote: >Dear Tipsters, >May I ask how Chris and others how you would react to this?
Okay. >I recently was asked to review two papers from two different journals. >One manuscript was anonymous and the other was not. Which means you don't know who authored one of the papers, consequently, you can't assert self-plagiarism. If there are multiple authors, it is possible that one paper has one first/senior author and the other paper has another first/senior author though having the same authors (the order of authors is altered because the different first authors was responsible for different data sets and their analysis). The "common" text might be considered "boiler plate" and was considered to be of less importance than the results. >The two papers presented different data but they referred to fairly >similar research questions. >Large chunks of the two introductions were word-for-word the same. >Parts of the method were word-for-word the same. In all likelihood, it comes from the same research project but whoever has oversight failed to appreciate the duplication (i.e., the senior researcher overseeing the project but who may not be the first author). >There was no clear cross-referencing for these bits of the text in the two >manuscripts. It is possible that (a) the use of "boilerplate" text was acceptable, (b) readers of one journal would not read the other journal, thus no one would detect the duplication, (c) someone meant to "revise" the text in one of the papers but forgot to (or sent in the wrong version of the paper), or (d) some other wacky reason (afterall, some researchers do do some really wacky things). >I saw this as (self-) plagiarism and expressed this view to the referees in >very strong terms. You're making the assumption that the anonymous paper has the same first author (i.e., author with major writing responsibility) as the paper with the known authorship. I don't think this was justified. By the way, when you say "referees", do you mean the editor(s)? >Do you think I was wrong? I think your assumption about self-plagiarism is wrong. I might have made copies of both manuscripts, highlighted the text that is common to both, wrote a letter pointing this out, and sent this to the editors of the two journals. I would ask the editors to check with the authors about what was going on. It could be that case that the authors of one manuscript are not aware of the existence of the other manuscript (again, some wacky things might be going on and one can't presume to know what is going on without additional info). -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
