In a subscription-only report on an upcoming conference presentation, Nature spills the beans on what may be our best handle yet on plagiarism in the world of academic science. Most research into this area has been limited by the inaccessibility of many of the peer-reviewed journals, which require subscription access. As such, it's hard to build a global picture of the literature. In physics and astronomy, however, many publications appear in the arXiv database, which typically hosts them in advance of publication.
Researchers created an arXiv crawler, and had it parse each paper into seven-word pieces. After throwing out common phrases (such as acknowledgments of support and affiliation), the program then looked for high numbers of shared text fragments. Plagiarism was defined as cases where there were high amounts of shared text, but no shared authors. Here, the news appears good: out of over 280,000 publications scanned, only 677 possible cases were identified. A detailed examination of 20 of these showed that just three were cases with serious, paper-wide duplications....Considering that arXiv manuscripts are often not in their final form, the real rate of problems may be even lower than that seen by the authors, as more citations may be added later in the preparation process....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/07/2006 10:39:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
