Study of Massive Preprint Archive Hints At the Geography of Plagiarism 53
sciencehabit writes with this excerpt from Science Insider: New analyses of the hundreds of thousands of technical manuscripts submitted to arXiv, the repository of digital preprint articles, are offering some intriguing insights into the consequences — and geography — of scientific plagiarism. It appears that copying text from other papers is more common in some nations than others, but the outcome is generally the same for authors who copy extensively: Their papers don't get cited much.
The system attempts to rule out certain kinds of innocent copying: "It's a fairly sophisticated machine learning logistic classifier," says arXiv founder Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at Cornell University. "It has special ways of detecting block quotes, italicized text, text in quotation marks, as well statements of mathematical theorems, to avoid false positives."
Play the game (Score:2)
The game is to find a unique angle to approach your research that's essentially clickbait, then produce some results, and figure out some way you can claim victory and go home.
If you're just doing this to get on to the next stage, it makes sense to plagiarize and get it out of the way. You can get to the nice fat yearly income that way without having to know much of anything.
Do we have a quality of scientists problem because science is such an esteemed (and often well-paid, in private practice at least) car
Re: (Score:2)
The game is to find a unique angle to approach your research that's essentially clickbait, then produce some results, and figure out some way you can claim victory and go home.
If you're just doing this to get on to the next stage, it makes sense to plagiarize and get it out of the way. You can get to the nice fat yearly income that way without having to know much of anything.
Do we have a quality of scientists problem because science is such an esteemed (and often well-paid, in private practice at least) career that people who should not be scientists are trying to be scientists?
© CaptainDork November 16, 1960
You bastard/bitch as applies.
Re:who cares about plagiarism (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does anyone need 'credit' for ideas?
Because it allows funding agencies, university tenure committees, etc. to determine which people are contributing useful new science to the world, and which people are dead wood sucking at the teat of an academic salary without creating anything useful to anybody.
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So you are saying that the only reason that people do anything is for recognition or money?
Are you?
It is not the only reason but for a large part : yes.
Yeah, some people genuinely love their jobs, and unfortunately, it looks like they are a minority. And even those who love their jobs wouldn't do it if they couldn't earn enough money from it.
And useful work that's done for neither recognition nor money... yes, it happens, in the same way that a coin can land on its edge. We may do small things out of pure generosity but science is no small thing. It requires time and skill and I believe it is normal for
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So you are saying that the only reason that people do anything is for recognition or money?
Are you?
No, I am saying that the people who have an interest in assigning credit for work are the people who provide funding and jobs, because they don't want to provide either funding or jobs to people who are not actually creating new ideas. These are also the people who pay for journal subscriptions, fund conferences and professional societies, and confer degrees.
As far as the people who do the research are concerned, very few of them would be able to continue doing research in the absence of funding. Do you th
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So you are saying that the only reason that people do anything is for recognition or money?
Are you?
No, clearly not - that would be an unjustified extrapolation of an unwarranted generalization of a simplistic reading of the point under discussion.
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Oh yeah baby- money makes the (academic) world go round.
I work in academia. You've never seen a researcher drop a project that "is his/her life's passion" as fast as when the money dries up.
I do IT for these people. As soon as that grant is done, you might as well pull the plug. Otherwise it becomes MY project- because they have moved on.
I've shit-canned websites with tons of good info that receive millions of page views per year, because the researcher doesn't care about it anymore. And since it is not
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Why does anyone need 'credit' for ideas?
Because "credit" leads to funding, pay raises, job security, and social status.
I think that recognizing a good idea is more important than boiling down credit to a single group or entity.
The problem is that research dollars go to a "group or entity" not to an idea. If you want to get rid of credit and recognition, then you need to propose an alternative way to provide incentives for productive research.
Re: who cares about plagiarism (Score:4, Interesting)
The idea of credit is just another lump on that intellectual property turd.
Let's be clear on what plagiarism is. It's deliberately and knowingly claiming authorship of the work of others. It's lying about who created a work.
Plagiarism and intellectual property need not have anything to do with each other. The people who argue that copyright prevents plagiarism are either confused, or trying to scrape up another justification to keep copyright. I think copyright should be abolished. And, that independent of whether copyright exists or not, plagiarism will still be undesirable, and that we can detect and punish those who do it. You don't see grade school students who are caught committing plagiarism being beat over the head with a copyright lawsuit, you see them punished with a failing grade, and perhaps detention.
Having said that, we don't want to get too extreme about plagiarism, start seeing it everywhere. Duplicate chess problems, in which someone honestly creates essentially the same problem that someone else did, maybe 100 years ago, are so common that there's a term for it: anticipation. Chess has been around for centuries, and it is getting harder to find original and novel concepts. Anticipation may become a problem in many other areas as they mature. George Harrison famously committed "subconcious" copyright infringement (plagiarism really) with My Sweet Lord, how should that be handled? The day will come, may already be here, when every possible short melody has been composed. What about ghostwriting, should that be accepted? We also don't want people bogged down trying to give due credit for everything. Otherwise, a research paper would have to credit the Phonecians for inventing the alphabet, lots of Greeks for various elementary mathematical concepts, the Babylonians for the base 60 time system we still use today, and maybe the Egyptians for papyrus, if the research is indeed printed on actual paper.
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Most angled saxophone players are plagiarist bastards who perform covers without paying into the ASCAP, BMI, SOCAN, or PRS group and stuff.
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Political context? (Score:2)
I suspect that the ratio in countries where the motivation could -literally- be publish or perish, will be consistently higher than those where the saying is figurative.
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Interestingly, using the word 'perish' to mean, 'lose one's job' is also figurative.
For the countries... (Score:2)
I am wondering how many of the people who are flagged as plagiarizing in countries with a low rate, if they are originally from countries with a higher rates.
I have studied the issue extensively (Score:4, Funny)
And, I have found that copying text from other papers is more common in some nations than others, but the outcome is generally the same for authors who copy extensively: Their papers don't get cited much.
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And, I have found that copying text from other papers is more common in some nations than others, but the outcome is generally the same for authors who copy extensively: Their papers don't get cited much.
Funny. That's exactly what TFA said.
It's almost as if you plagiarized it.
Study pinpoints "lazy" authors too (Score:2)
about one in 16 arXiv authors were found to have copied long phrases and sentences from their own previously published work
OK, sometimes quoting your own work may be legit, but this sounds more like simple boilerplate cut and paste
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I work a lot with data from astronomy satellites. A lot of the first steps of the analysis, and describing the spacecraft
and its instruments are very close to the same from paper to paper of mine. (And similarly for other people doing similar
work.) This results in a lot of near (and sometimes exact) duplication of text. However, I believe this is still valid
and necessary. The heart of the paper - i.e. the new results and conclusions - does still differ of course!
Egypt must have a lot of Vice Presidents (Score:1)
Joe Biden, serial plagiarist [google.com].
Seems more like a relationship with quantiy (Score:2)
Gaming the system (Score:2, Informative)
I wonder how much these disparities are due to western researchers knowing how to game the system. Some 10 years ago I received a warning related to "self-plagiarism" because I had copied the definition of a problem from one of my previous papers (one column, the rest of the paper was completely new). Since then, I know I have to change the text of the problem definition between two papers, even if it is the same. In the meantime, I have seen people submit the same work to two different conferences after ch
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So why not just quote yourself then? I mean, self-plagiarism is just like plagiarism (except you're presenting existing ideas as new, rather than other's ideas as yours).
Is it too hard to cite o
Moral of the story (Score:3)
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Looks similar to the Media/Game piracy maps I've seen too.
Anglophones plagiarize/pirate the least, followed by western Europe and Japan, Middle east/Eastern Europe/Third world plagiarizes/pirates the most.
Considering that we've read that in some countries they have seminars/meetings to tell their business people who come to America to NOT try to use the bribery/graft thing that's usual in their countries, especially not with law enforcement..it probably is cultural.
I'm not saying that there isn't bribery i
Some countries' education systems reward parroting (Score:5, Interesting)
Some countries place a high premium on memorizing and repeating back the teacher's words. These countries still produce their share of good and bad engineers, but they're sometimes bad in unrecognizable ways.
I once hired a software engineer from a third world country who had an encyclopedic knowledge of design patterns. You could name any pattern in the GoF *Design Patterns* book and he could reel off the UML without hesitation and give a convincing sounding explanation of how the pattern worked. But when I started inspecting his code, I quickly realized he had no understanding of what any of it meant. It was just pictures and words he'd memorized, an impressive and prodigious feat, but ultimately useless to me.
Now I should say I've hired some very good software engineers from this country; it's not that they don't make good engineers over there. For most people the discipline to absorb a lot of information yields many benefits. But this guy was an outlier; he managed to get a master's degree over there in a subject he had no practical understanding of whatsoever.
Doesn't look right to me... (Score:2)
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Come on now ... (Score:1)
The geographical presentation is flawed (Score:3)
To quote the article "It shows only the incidence of flagged authors for the 57 nations with at least 100 submitted papers, to minimize distortion from small sample sizes." If a country has a total number of papers in the hundreds it implies the number of authors is also low. Therefor, a small number of authors who routinely plagiarize can have a major effect.
It's analogous to a small town with a very low crime rate. All it takes is a few significant incidences to cause a huge jump in the statistics.
For comparison, it would be interesting to see the rates for other kinds of text reuse. From the article:
For comparison it would be useful to see the percentage of this reuse displayed on another map. I have a strong suspicion that countries that look good on the presented map would not look nearly as good by this measure.