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Wikipedia and Plagiarism
Spo22a writes "Daniel Brandt found the examples of suspected plagiarism at Wikipedia using a program he created to run a few sentences from about 12,000 articles against Google Inc.'s search engine. He removed matches in which another site appeared to be copying from Wikipedia, rather than the other way around, and examples in which material is in the public domain and was properly attributed.
Brandt ended with a list of 142 articles, which he brought to Wikipedia's attention.... 'They present it as an encyclopedia," Brandt said Friday. "They go around claiming it's almost as good as Britannica. They are trying to be mainstream respectable.'"
We're not talking about press releases. We're talking about "peer reviewed" original scientific research reported in the best scientific/medical journals being ghostauthored by drug companies, where the stated authors (from academia) have nothing to do with the work other than accepting a check for having their name listed and the drug company involvement is masked. In some cases, the same papers are published more than once and the papers promote off-label use of the drugs.
While not all that well-known, the phenomenon is actually well-reported in both the medical and scientific press. There are some academicians who have literally built their careers on this practice.