In its May Editorial, Nature Photonics (3, 237; 2009) describes some of the ways in which the Nature journals combat scientific misconduct and practices such as ‘guest’ authorship. Part of the Editorial concerns plagiarism:

“Many forms of plagiarism exist, but the goal is generally the same — to garner false or undue credit. Plagiarism sometimes involves reuse of another author’s published work, but it is commonly thought that the most typical tool of the plagiarist is self-plagiarism: the reuse of substantial parts of an author’s own published work, particularly without appropriate referencing, and less commonly, duplicate publication, in which the results are recycled in their entirety.

The peer-review process provides a net for catching offenders, but it cannot provide a fail-safe barrier. As a result, Nature Photonics is now starting to use the plagiarism-detection software ”https://www.crossref.org/crosscheck.html">CrossCheck, which makes comparative checks between provided manuscripts and those previously published and in an existing database. Any manuscript that seems to show an abnormally high match will be immediately investigated. Unfortunately, plagiarism can also occur without verbatim duplication of words or data. And it is here that the lines between normal and acceptable activity and plagiarism become smeared, and the likelihood of detection and punitive repercussions is diminished.

Using another researcher’s arguments and logic, even if the text is not identical, without due reference is intellectual plagiarism. This type of plagiarism can be subtle and as simple as not including a reference to a highly relevant previous paper. Citation-related plagiarism, whether it is intentional, or due to gross negligence, can give an untruthful impression of precedence, reassigning credit from the original discoverer to another person.

When reporting scientific messages, it is an author’s responsibility to find and acknowledge the critically relevant literature, or at least to have endeavoured to do so with rigour. Failing this can result in falsely apportioned claims, albeit caused by negligence.

If plagiarism is suspected in research results published by us, it is our policy to conduct an immediate investigation and if deemed appropriate to contact the author’s institute and funding agencies and consider a formal retraction of the paper. Although it is often the first authors who have historically borne the brunt of confirmed misconduct allegations, our editorial policies highlight the serious responsibilities of all coauthors: “submission to a Nature journal is taken by the journal to mean that all the listed authors have agreed to the content”. It is unreasonable to expect each author to be responsible for every aspect of the paper, but it is the responsibility of the corresponding author to manage the understanding that all authors are expected to have made reasonable attempts to check the findings submitted to a journal for publication."

The full text of this Nature Photonics Editorial.

Nature Photonics guide to authors.

About the Nature Photonics editors.

Nature journals policy on plagiarism.

Nature journals policy on authorship.

Here is the text of an Editorial in the 30 April issue of Nature (458, 1078; 2009 – free to access online):

The Nature journals encourage authors to treat their data and their collaborators with the respect that their communities demand. High-profile journals have a duty to reinforce the trends towards greater transparency and to help scientists to fulfil their responsibilities as researchers and authors. We are therefore introducing small but important changes in our policies to reflect these goals.

In a previous Editorial (Nature 450, 1; 2007), we asked for feedback about whether we should require senior or corresponding authors to sign a statement that they had taken some specific ‘integrity insurance’ steps before the manuscript was submitted. Some applauded this idea, but most were not in favour. (Some of the feedback can be seen here.) Major doubts were expressed about the ability of corresponding authors to take on such responsibility given the diversity of collaborations. The belief was also expressed that such signed statements would too often be worthless box-ticking exercises. Although we regretfully accept these realities, we believe that we should go further in spelling out the responsibilities of co-authors, and in requiring an implicit acceptance of them.

Accordingly, we have modified the Nature journal policy on authorship, which is detailed on our website. For papers submitted by collaborations, we now delineate the responsibilities of the senior members of each collaboration group on the paper. Before submitting the paper, at least one senior member from each collaborating group must take responsibility for their group’s contribution. Three major responsibilities are covered: preservation of the original data on which the paper is based, verification that the figures and conclusions accurately reflect the data collected and that manipulations to images are in accordance with Nature journal guidelines, and minimization of obstacles to sharing materials, data and algorithms through appropriate planning.

Corresponding authors have multiple responsibilities, but we now make it clearer that the author list should include all appropriate researchers and no others, and that the order has been agreed to by all authors. They are expected to have notified all authors when the manuscript was submitted, they are the point of contact with the editor and they must communicate any matters that arise after publication to their co-authors.

Another change is that we have strengthened our policy for statements of authors’ contributions. This policy was first introduced nearly 10 years ago (Nature 399, 393; 1999) to make the credit due to individual co-authors more explicit. Since then, authors of Nature papers have had the opportunity to include in their papers a statement that details each author’s role in the published work. Over the past 10 years, the proportion of authors who choose to include this has risen dramatically.

This acceptance, and discussions with authors who have chosen not to include such a statement, has led us to change our policy. Rather than ‘strongly encouraging’ such statements, we now require them for publication of original research papers in Nature and the Nature research journals. The detail provided can vary tremendously and authors are left to structure them as they see fit. We insist only that no author be left out.

To ensure that authors are familiar with these changes, we will shortly require the corresponding author to confirm that he or she has read the Nature journal policies on author responsibilities and is submitting the manuscript in accordance with those policies.

Nature journals’ authorship policies.