Slashdot Mirror
Software Finds Plagiarism In Research
shmG writes "Researchers from the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute have created a seek-and-destroy program — for plagiarism. Called ET Blast, it's designed to find plagiarism in scientific papers. It does a full-text analysis, and then looks for similar publications in several databases. 'We have better literature,' Garner said. 'There are abstracts and full papers, and a database called Crisp, where you compare stuff to every grant the NIH gets. It's compared to any research that's been funded.'"
What about academic "recycling".
I remember being told a long time ago that some researchers will basically make several permutations of the same paper to submit to a bunch of different places. It's essentially the same paper, with nothing new in it, but if you can get several places to publish it, you can pad out your publications list.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Would be nice to widen it to IP & Copyright infringement.
This sounds almost exactly like turnitin.com where when one uploads a paper to it, it searches almost anything it can get ahold of and will list any text in any academic journal that is copied verbatim.
So did they run it against LIGATT's Gregory Evans' titular training book on how to Become the World's #1 Hacker, 100% plagiarized? http://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Worlds-No-Hacker/dp/0982609108/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
Even better if it will show papers that are suspiciously similar to pharmaceutical companies advertising literature.
Since researchers constantly plagiarize their own work in order to get their paper count up, there are going to be some very red faces....
if you resubmit your own work, it's not plagiarism.
Correct! It's amazing to see how many people don't understand this point, but it's correct: you can't plagiarize yourself, because plagiarism is the act of passing somebody else's work off as being yours.
I hate it when researchers report the same work in many different papers, but although it is a violation of research reporting standards, and in some cases a violation of an intellectual property contract... it's not plagiarism.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I wonder, how is the false positive / false negative rate? I mean, places like turnitin.com for example shows this problem quite well with regards to how even quotes - cited and all - raise some flags.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
I can't blame the submitter for this one. The article itself uses the term "search and destroy" early on, yet says absolutely nothing about destroying anything.
They found a research paper on hydrogen stole 2 thirds from an existing paper on water.
link to RePORTer: http://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter.cfm
in addition, it only contains funded grant materials, and only abstracts. perhaps, (s)he is referring to Pubmed and PubMedCentral (PMC).
anyway, I'm not scared.
Oops! Make that "seek and destroy" instead of "search and destroy", but still, it's just sensationalism.
I once had an English teacher who said, "If you have more than five consecutive words matching a source, without a citation then it's plagiarism." Perhaps that's how freshman writing assignments are graded, but it's silly when applied to scientific papers. Pick up any math paper on number theory, and you're bound to find the sentence "Let p be an odd prime number." without citation, but that would hardly qualify as plagiarism. Yet, syntactic matching appears to be exactly what this program is doing.
What constitutes "plagiarism" in a scientific paper is very different from plagiarism in journalism or English literature. In scientific writing, it is expected that authors will use the same flat, impersonal style and repeat definitions and the results of others to save the reader the time of having to look them up. So, simple pattern matching between science papers will result in a great many false positives. In science (and math) writing what matters is the new result which the author is claiming. It seems to me that it would be nearly impossible for a computer program to detect the distinction.
I poked around the site, and found the page describing some JSON APIs and things, but no links to code or developer pages.
So where's the code?
Hmm, okay, that's weird. The project is run by the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, but the disclaimer says:
This software and data are provided to enhance knowledge and encourage progress in the scientific community and are to be used only for research and educational purposes. Any reproduction or use for commercial purpose is prohibited without the prior express written permission of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
So they don't hold copyright to it? Or they didn't write it? Hmmmm....
coding is life
About flipping time!
This is no different than the student version and it is very good at what it's doing. This means that profs who "cheat" will get caught. Amazing!
In High School, they tried to cram the concept of "self plagiarism" down our throats - what a crock of shit... you can NOT by DEFINITION plagiarize YOUR OWN WORKS. Recycling may be lazy, may violate other ethics, but to call it plagiarism is, IMO, very intellectually dishonest of these institutions.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Not only is this lame, but how does it handle passages where a work is quoted legitimately. I despise crap like this and Turnitin.
Several academic and research institutions have noted a sharp drop of published research from their Chinese native researchers. Experts are speculating there may be a link between this and the institutions' recent adoption of ET Blast.
Because, because beyond certain point of recycling, it's just dishonesty.
Even though recycling is not plagiarism, I would love to see this tool being used to create some sort of recycling ranking for individual academics and colleges. There is a not-so-fine line between exploring different aspects of a subject and simply recycling for the purpose of maximizing presence. The former is necessary for the pursuit of research. The later is just f* dishonesty (and a costly one for society since it is typically used for securing research moolah.)
I actually ran into this in grad school. When writing a tech related paper, I referenced one of my past papers on the same subject as a source. My professor made it clear I had to cite myself to avoid "self-plagiarism". I thought it quite possibly the stupidest thing I had ever heard in my life, and it was coming from a celebrated PhD at a major New England university.
... can it find dupes on Slashdot?
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
In the UK they do this for UCAS (University) applications, they check your personal statement to test both if it plagiarises or it's crap (uses too many common themes) and warns you about it.
The reason for the rise of the concept of "self-plagiarism" is these types of automated plagiarism detectors. If I have written a lot of papers that are in their database and can lift sections out of a previous paper I wrote without citing it as a source, these programs are going to generate a lot of false positives.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Maybe the problem is that we don't have a good terms to differentiate between appropriate reuse of one's own writing, and unnaceptable reuse.
For instance, it's a violation of academic ethics to try to publish the exact same paper in multiple places. You're effectively trying to increase your publication count without adding anything new to the body of knowledge. It's still not plagiarism, since it's your own work, but it is unethical.
Not citing previous work when writing a paper is also wrong, though not in the same way. It can be either an honest mistake, lazy, or downright unethical (e.g. not citing the work of someone you don't like). Not citing your own previous work in the area is similarly wrong. Not because it would be plagiarism, but because citations are vital to help others understand the context, significance, and background to the present work. So you should cite yourself when appropriate, just as you would cite others.
And lastly, there are times where re-using your own material is absolutely acceptable. For instance when releasing a new edition of a book, it just makes sense to tweak the things that need changing. It doesn't make sense to rewrite every sentence to avoid 'plagiarizing' yourself. Similarly if you write a review article of a certain field, it just makes sense to re-use some of the text from a previous review (now outdated) that you wrote. (There may or may not be secondary copyright concerns, depending on the various contracts in place.) It isn't plagiarism, and it isn't wrong.
Perhaps academia needs to develop terms to cleanly differentiate between these cases. Or alternately people need to be more specific when they are talking about appropriate vs. inappropriate behavior. Abusing "plagiarism" as a catch-all for "unethical publication" confuses the issue.
Tell that to my university where I got accused of academic dishonesty for reusing one paragraph again in a course that I failed. Utterly ridiculous.
"Okay, I give myself permission to copy work from myself....there.....now it isn't plagiarism."
DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
To follow my last post, I usually like to use the following argument: If I'm asked what the answer to 1+1 is, I'm going to answer '2'. I'm not going to say that the answer is '3' next time just to make my answer different.
DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
Yes, but maybe the problem is that we don't have a good terms to differentiate between appropriate reuse of one's own writing, and unnaceptable reuse.
For instance, it's a violation of academic ethics to try to publish the exact same paper in multiple places. You're effectively trying to increase your publication count without adding anything new to the body of knowledge. It's still not plagiarism, since it's your own work, but it is unethical.
Not citing previous work when writing a paper is also wrong, though not in the same way. It can be either an honest mistake, lazy, or downright unethical (e.g. not citing the work of someone you don't like). Not citing your own previous work in the area is similarly wrong. Not because it would be plagiarism, but because citations are vital to help others understand the context, significance, and background to the present work. So you should cite yourself when appropriate, just as you would cite others.
And lastly, there are times where re-using your own material is absolutely acceptable. For instance when releasing a new edition of a book, it just makes sense to tweak the things that need changing. It doesn't make sense to rewrite every sentence to avoid 'plagiarizing' yourself. Similarly if you write a review article of a certain field, it just makes sense to re-use some of the text from a previous review (now outdated) that you wrote. (There may or may not be secondary copyright concerns, depending on the various contracts in place.) It isn't plagiarism, and it isn't wrong.
Perhaps academia needs to develop terms to cleanly differentiate between these cases. Or alternately people need to be more specific when they are talking about appropriate vs. inappropriate behavior. Abusing "plagiarism" as a catch-all for "unethical publication" confuses the issue.
RECYCLOPS will make you recycle!
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
How is that news? I've seen a few universities using systems like that for a few years now...
The first study I read in Nature ten years ago placed it about 1-2% in European/North American Journals. A more recent study doubled that figure. Pilot tests in Asia find the number well into double digits.
No one has fully stated the cause for the increase. I am guessing its better software and nearly all papers are in electronic databases now. A more pessimistic explanation would be that as the "Internet Generation" enters the scientific workforce, their sloppy IP habits migrate into research papers.
The same recent Nature article recommended routine scans of submitted papers to reduce plagiarism retractions in the future. Retractions are always embarassing to editors.
http://www.crossref.org/crosscheck.html
They already create DOIs for their published work and now can check the works before publishing.
It does help others find your previous work.
In fingerprint analysis, the computer spits out a possible match. It's up to the human to determine whether or not that match is valid. It's the same with this stuff.
You're just not being creative enough. You can come up with a different answer, for example "1+1 is 1.999..." or "1+1 is 1, for sufficiently large values of 1" etc.
If only the Philippine Supreme Court had this technology ..... http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/insights/08/09/10/plagiarism-supreme-court
Very often, much of the introductory and methodology sections may be recycled or adapted from previous publications and only the results and conclusions are scientifically novel.
Unfortunately, during the beta stage the program came across this certain Spielberg movie and a Metallica song and offed itself. Too bad, it seemed to be a pretty handy piece of software.
This is a really great tool, actually. For scientific, the time between gathering notes/ideas/data and writing them down can be significant. Even an academic mini-thesis might have 200+ citations. By the time you write the paper it's hard to remember which of your (handwritten) notes are original. I've always wanted a tool that could double check for me.
Software finds plagiarism in Research? Research finds plagiarism in Software. Research finds plagiarism in software used to find plagiarism in research. Software finds plagiarism in research used to find plagiarism in software. Will this arm's race never end? Please?? And won't someone think of the children?
I was saying to myself, wait, this post is identical to the previous one... duh.
But, since you're posting as anonymous, it doesn't increase your publication count to republish it. Fail.
(And, anyway, "Anonymous Coward" is already the most-cited author on slashdot.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
... can it find dupes on Slashdot?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The article points to this link for the search engine. I did a search with a small paragraph copied from a paper and found too many results with different scores (it doesn't explain what these scores mean). It didn't tell anything decisively if the text is copied from any source, which is expected from a plagiarism tool.
Secondly, the About page doesn't talk plagiarism at all. What it says is: "eTBLAST is a unique search engine for searching biomedical literature. Our service is very different from PubMed. While PubMed searches for "keywords", our search engine lets you input an entire paragraph and returns MEDLINE abstracts that are similar to it. This is something like PubMed's "Related Articles" feature, only better because it runs on your unique set of interests."
However, I must say that the results did give lot of interesting related papers in the same subject which is not easy to find with keyword search. To me, it looks more like a search engine where you can search using a paragraph instead of keywords, which is quite impressive in itself. The site also offers few nifty features such as "Find an Expert" and "Find a Journal" which should be useful for research professionals. I also found the citations page to be quite informative. Since this service is free with API's available, it can be a great source for creating mashups.
It has the potential to destroy the reputations of unethical scientists, because some scientists publish slight changes of a single paper of theirs to multiple journals to increase their publication count. This system will hopefully bring some sunshine on that practice, because the scientists who are essentially copying their own papers make other scientists (who are actually doing research and writing separate papers for each publication) look bad, as their publication count isn't as high. Publication count lower than another scientist translates to lower money for research the next year.
Thanks to these scientists to bring sunshine to their own field. This kind of a meta-version of the mantra that science is self correcting, as some scientists are using science to destroy the reputations of other, unethical, scientists. Go science!
Maybe the problem is that we don't have a good terms to differentiate between appropriate reuse of one's own writing, and unnaceptable reuse.
It always used to make me chuckle to find textbook references cited as "personal observation" in journal articles written by one of my university's professors. Most scientists can't get away with that. But if you are as much of a bigwig in your field as he was, I guess it's not as arrogant as it might seem.
like i said
46 & 2
Most publications are group work. Maybe the first author wrote the entire work without input, using only the results of others. And maybe every other author made significant changes or critiques. Those words can't be reused – unless they include every previous author in the new list. Reuse an introduction a few times and the author list is going to get pretty long. Anyway, it is copyright violation to use previously published phrases and images in a publication for a different publisher. That is clear.
46 & 2
"Ouch."
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Didn't I read this same article last week?
My English prof back in 2000 had this software already. :)
However, my final paper was "borrowing" quiet heavily and he didn't find out. Maybe this version works better?
Now that should be easy to fix in the software:
if author_new == author_old then plagiarism = False
if you resubmit your own work, it's not plagiarism.
Correct! It's amazing to see how many people don't understand this point, but it's correct: you can't plagiarize yourself, because plagiarism is the act of passing somebody else's work off as being yours.
I hate it when researchers report the same work in many different papers, but although it is a violation of research reporting standards, and in some cases a violation of an intellectual property contract... it's not plagiarism.
Tell that to John Fogerty! Okay, he won, but still.....
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