Comments on The General Blog of Crime: Double-Dip

Now here's an interesting side-effect of checking ...

2008-03-04T21:22:00.000-05:00

Now here's an interesting side-effect of checking for plagiarism:

I received a paper to review tonight for The Journal of Non-Dairy Frozen Desserts and ran it through Article Checker. Several of the hits that matched the article were from a couple of official reports written for state government. I did not click on the links to the matched texts, because I assume I will then see the authors' names (from the official reports).

So, you may inadvertently stumble across the authors' names while checking for plagiarism. Of course, one could argue that it is sometimes easy to figure out who the author's are (based on well known data sets or self-referencing); so checking for plagiarism doesn't mean you're necessarily trying to determine the author.

Did pap just indicate he and Patch make beautiful ...

2008-03-03T20:15:00.000-05:00

Did pap just indicate he and Patch make beautiful words together? Keep up the beautious work!

All of this reminds me of when Dr. Cranky found a plagiarized dissertation when doing his lit review for his dissertation. That was some crazy stuff...

ShockProf-A good resource. At what point will suc...

2008-03-03T15:39:00.000-05:00

ShockProf-
A good resource. At what point will such a measure become an accepted expectation of editors? Will we receive verification of the article's integrity ("articlechecker.com rates this submission at 6 %) in the review letter/e-mail we are sent editors?

Cranky

ps- (activating Homer Simpson voice) Hmmmm, ice cream. Gahadfdsphfdpoihds! (or whatever sound he makes as he drools while dreaming of food, or beer....Hmmmm, beer. Gahadfdsphfdpoihds!)

After considering Patch's point, I think I'm going...

2008-03-03T10:05:00.000-05:00

After considering Patch's point, I think I'm going to run all articles I review through a plagiarism checker from now on. Here's a free one:

http://www.articlechecker.com

Make sure to copy & the paste the ENTIRE article into the text box--it will tell you what % of the content can be found on the web (and it includes Google Scholar).

Keep in mind that some phrases appear frequently ("Research has shown"), and you'll probably get a 5-7% match just on those common phrases.

Another point to consider--it may be difficult to ...

2008-03-02T18:14:00.000-05:00

Another point to consider--it may be difficult to craft a unique literature review for an analysis when you're just adding a single variable because YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO JUST ADD ONE VARIABLE. If the added variable (% chocolate content, for example) was theoretically important, then it should have been in the first paper.

Don't rule out a junior author who needs "just one...

2008-03-02T16:35:00.000-05:00

Don't rule out a junior author who needs "just one more" for a tenure dossier. I think everyone knows this is wrong, but I also can empathize, to an extent, with the challenge of writing distinct manuscripts on very similar topics.

I've not seen anything quite that bad in reviewing manuscripts, though I have read multiple works by others where I have seen this occur (though never that much). I did do a review a while back where it was quite evident who wrote the article and I was familiar with the prior work this author had done. Although the manuscript wasn't verbatim as Dr. HnK experienced, I read the thing twice and couldn't really detect the person making a new contribution. They were trying to squeeze one more piece of a dissertation that didn't have that much to give in the first place. I rejected it on the grounds it didn't say anything new.

Of course, I once found a plagiarized dissertation, but that's a story for another day...

This is just crazy. And you wonder how much of thi...

2008-03-01T14:31:00.000-05:00

This is just crazy. And you wonder how much of this actually happens that isn't caught. As I mentioned to Dr. HnK, back when I was working on my thesis I found a couple of articles that were very similar in content (though clearly not as blatant as her case).

I think it is a fine line. Pap and I wrote a few cyberbullying articles from the same dataset and the lit review just doesn't change that much over a 4 month period. So there is going to be some overlap. That said, someone who is interested in one of those articles will probably want to ready all of them so they have to be at least somewhat distinct. I was so concerned about this with our most recent myspace paper that I ran them both through turnitin so I could see how much overlap there was between two papers.

Clearly they should have known that it was wrong to copy pages and pages from the other article. As I tell students who I catch plagiarizing: "You are either lazy or stupid and my guess it is a little of both."

What a great post. Seriously. Thanks for taking ...

2008-03-01T10:38:00.000-05:00

What a great post. Seriously. Thanks for taking the time to write it. First off, it makes me recall ShockProf's discussion in our doctoral level stats class about plagiarizing from oneself. I agree that the senior superstar scholar probably didn't know about what happened here, and such knowledge doesn't affect the severity of this matter. It's still shocking.

Patch and I are highly sensitive to the replication of sentences and sometimes even beautiful phrases we've wordsmithed together in different (but related) articles. Anyway, while I don't think its necessary to never have duplicate phrases in articles based on the same phenomenon or dataset, all that is required on an ethical level is to be cognizant of it and to address it when it causes a lack of peace when thinking about it. Nine pages!? 85%%?!!?!

I think it's laziness. And I think it's refusing to allow oneself to think seriously about what they're doing. I can't imagine one would purposefully choose to scheme to successfully double dip like this.

I know about people who live in glass houses, etc. So obviously this makes me (us) check myself (ourselves) before pointing fingers. Nine pages!? 85%%?!!?!

I would have also contacted the editor. And this has never happened to me.

Nine pages!? 85%%?!!?!