Study of Massive Preprint Archive Hints At the Geography of Plagiarism

sciencehabit writes with this excerpt from Science Insider: New analyses of the hundreds of thousands of technical manuscripts submitted to arXiv, the repository of digital preprint articles, are offering some intriguing insights into the consequences — and geography — of scientific plagiarism. It appears that copying text from other papers is more common in some nations than others, but the outcome is generally the same for authors who copy extensively: Their papers don't get cited much. The system attempts to rule out certain kinds of innocent copying: "It's a fairly sophisticated machine learning logistic classifier," says arXiv founder Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at Cornell University. "It has special ways of detecting block quotes, italicized text, text in quotation marks, as well statements of mathematical theorems, to avoid false positives."

Comments

Gaming the system

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how much these disparities are due to western researchers knowing how to game the system. Some 10 years ago I received a warning related to "self-plagiarism" because I had copied the definition of a problem from one of my previous papers (one column, the rest of the paper was completely new). Since then, I know I have to change the text of the problem definition between two papers, even if it is the same. In the meantime, I have seen people submit the same work to two different conferences after changing just the wording of the papers (or the presentation), and not being charged with plagiarism (especially if they are well-established in the field). Actual plagiarism I have only seen in one paper with chinese authors. So, presuming most plagiarism is in fact self-plagiarism I wonder how pertinent the results are.