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

Re:who cares about plagiarism

[PvtVoid]

Why does anyone need 'credit' for ideas?

Because it allows funding agencies, university tenure committees, etc. to determine which people are contributing useful new science to the world, and which people are dead wood sucking at the teat of an academic salary without creating anything useful to anybody.