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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.'"
if you resubmit your own work, it's not plagiarism.
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.
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.
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
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.