Journals should be routinely checking papers they publish for signs of plagiarism, a team of American researchers is demanding.

In a commentary paper published in Science the team headed by Harold Garner, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, report their checking of similar citations in the Medline database. They found 212 pairs of articles with “signs of potential plagiarism” using a computer programme called eTBLAST.

“We have just started to scratch the surface, we anticipate finding hundreds to thousands more cases. It is definitely the tip of the iceberg,” says Garner (Globe and Mail).

Garner previously used the same programme on Medline to find duplicate citations and found thousands of cases of potential plagiarism. Writing in Nature in January 2008 Garner and fellow researcher Mounir Errami wrote:

We find it odd that automated text-matching systems are used regularly by high schools and universities, thereby enabling us to hold our children up to a higher standard than we do our scientists. In our view, it would be fairly simple to fold these tools into electronic-manuscript submission systems, making it a ubiquitous aspect of the publication process.

Now they are again pushing the issue in their new piece, and reporting the responses of editors and authors of both the original paper and the suspected plagiarism.

“Studying these reactions might help to illuminate the reasons for such misconduct and might provide a way for the scientific community to prevent such activity in the future,” says Garner (press release).

Sample reactions:

Original author:

We were very sorry and somewhat surprised when we found their article. I don’t want to accept them as scientists.

Editor:

It’s my understanding that copying someone else’s description virtually word-for-word, as these authors have done, is considered a compliment to the person whose words were copied.

Second paper author:

I would like to offer my apology to the authors of the original paper for not seeking the permission for using some part of their paper. I was not aware of the fact I am required to take such permission.

“Given the pressures of research and the temptations to cheat, it will require the combined strength of the whole community to react uniformly against plagiarism if we expect to discourage it. Garner’s work clearly shows that the scientific community has not reached this level of cohesiveness when it comes to acting against plagiarism,” says Yun Xie of Ars Technica. “It’s also unclear how it can be achieved, or even if it’s a realistic goal. Nevertheless, some degree of continued awareness of the problem and attempts to stop it are necessary to keep it a rare occurrence.”

In the interests of holding everyone to the same standards The Great Beyond has run Garner’s latest paper through the eTBLAST system. See the results here.