A Short Warning
Posted by Tom Leinster
It’s not very often that one comes across blatant plagiarism, but I just have. I’m not going to give the details, partly because I’m not sure that public naming and shaming is the right thing to do, and partly because I don’t want to be sued. But I do want to say a little, because raising awareness may help to prevent this kind of thing from happening too often.
In outline, then, the story is this. I’m on the editorial board of Theory and Applications of Categories, and I had a paper submitted to me for publication there. I quickly smelt a rat: the standard of English in the covering email and the abstract was fairly poor, whereas the language in much of the paper was rather nice, with some admirably deft turns of phrase. I believe I even recognized the writing style of one of my co-hosts here at the Café.
So I did some googling and discovered that yes, large parts of the text were copied nearly verbatim from other papers. Some of the papers they copied from were cited. At least seven were not. Their biggest source was Higher-dimensional algebra VI: Lie 2-algebras by John Baez and Alissa Crans, which—modulo the replacement of “vector space” by “module”—makes up at least nine of their pages.
This may or may not be an isolated incident. The fact is that plagiarism can be systematic. For example, there was the Turkish plagiarism ring (or rings) uncovered in 2007, involving something like 67 papers and 15 physicists at four Turkish universities. In this case I discovered when googling that some parts of the text had already appeared more than once in the literature, by different authors. One particular sentence was on at least its fourth outing. I didn’t attempt to dig any deeper.
My main reason for writing this is to warn other editors who may receive this paper, or others like it. There’s nothing I particularly want to discuss.
Re: A Short Warning
Can Alissa and I list this paper on our CVs? They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it should be worth something.
One great thing about the arXiv is that when a plagiarized paper is put up there, it’s more likely to be caught — since everyone can see it. And when it’s caught, that fact becomes painfully public, like this.
Papers on TAC are also publicly visible, so even if that paper had been accepted, it would have been caught.
The best way to hide plagiarism or otherwise shoddy work is to publish it in an expensive but low-quality journal that nobody would buy except as part of large ‘bundle’ of electronic subscriptions. As long as few people actually read your paper, you’ll get credit for publication without getting caught.
Perhaps I should prepare a list of ‘best journals to submit plagiarized papers to’.