Thursday, May 31, 2012

Plagiat: (K)ein Kavaliersdelikt?

I spoke at a conference at the University of Mainz yesterday on scientific misconduct. I unfortunately had to leave before the end, as I had obtained ticket to an important event long before this conference was set up. But I did hear some of the talks, so here are some ideas links that might be important to readers of this blog:
  • Gerhard Fröhlich (Linz) spoke about what he calls the "Beichtspiegeleffekt" - when you read the list of sins that you have to confess in the Catholic church, you might get some ideas you didn't otherwise have. He warns that we may have to deal with this when teaching students about plagiarism. This means that we have to be very careful that we actually follow through with dealing with plagiarism and not just tell people about it. He also noted that the digitalization of books is not part of the problem of plagiarism, it is part of the solution.
  • Ulrich Herb (Saarbrücken) spoke about junk journals. He had some interesting links:
    • Jeffrey Beall keeps a list of predatory open access publishers
    • Beall also posted The Story of Tahira Mughal, Assistant Professor of Botany at the Lahore College for Women University ("The only problem is that many of the passages that appear in Dr. Mughal's work appeared previously in other scholarly articles.") 
    • Ralf Neumann in laborjournal: Von zweifelhaftem Verhalten der Journals (I love the picture of the rotten apples)
    •   arXiv withdrew 65 papers in August 2007. The link I noted does not work, but it is educational to search for the term "withdraw".
    • Brumfiel, Geoff. Turkish physicists face accusations of plagiarism. Nature 449 8 (6. Sept. 2007) Abstract: "The article discusses about the more than a dozen of physicists at four universities in Turkey who were involved in a massive plagiarism of scandal. The researches have plagiarized the works of the others or contain inappropriate levels of overlap with earlier researches."
    • Research Papers on Economics publishes a list of plagiarism offenders. I'm glad to see Hans W. Gottinger on the list. 
    • Another Nature article: How to stop plagiarism (2012) Nature, 481 (7379), 21-23 Abstract: "Duplication is easily detected by software, yet it remains a problem. Ten experts explain how to stamp it out."
  • There is a new law dissertation published about plagiarism: Plagiat in der Wissenschaft, by Julian Waiblinger. There is a short review to be found on the blog Jurabilis.
There were some other links, but they deserve longer articles.

1 comment:

  1. "arXiv withdrew 65 papers in August 2007": The link, http://arxiv.org/new/withdrawals.aug.07.html , works properly. You can find some details about this story and more at http://plagiarism-main.blogspot.com

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