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

who cares about plagiarism

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does anyone need 'credit' for ideas? I think that recognizing a good idea is more important than boiling down credit to a single group or entity.

We need to divest ourselves from the mind virus that intellectual property. The idea of credit is just another lump on that intellectual property turd.

Re: who cares about plagiarism

[bzipitidoo]

The idea of credit is just another lump on that intellectual property turd.

Let's be clear on what plagiarism is. It's deliberately and knowingly claiming authorship of the work of others. It's lying about who created a work.

Plagiarism and intellectual property need not have anything to do with each other. The people who argue that copyright prevents plagiarism are either confused, or trying to scrape up another justification to keep copyright. I think copyright should be abolished. And, that independent of whether copyright exists or not, plagiarism will still be undesirable, and that we can detect and punish those who do it. You don't see grade school students who are caught committing plagiarism being beat over the head with a copyright lawsuit, you see them punished with a failing grade, and perhaps detention.

Having said that, we don't want to get too extreme about plagiarism, start seeing it everywhere. Duplicate chess problems, in which someone honestly creates essentially the same problem that someone else did, maybe 100 years ago, are so common that there's a term for it: anticipation. Chess has been around for centuries, and it is getting harder to find original and novel concepts. Anticipation may become a problem in many other areas as they mature. George Harrison famously committed "subconcious" copyright infringement (plagiarism really) with My Sweet Lord, how should that be handled? The day will come, may already be here, when every possible short melody has been composed. What about ghostwriting, should that be accepted? We also don't want people bogged down trying to give due credit for everything. Otherwise, a research paper would have to credit the Phonecians for inventing the alphabet, lots of Greeks for various elementary mathematical concepts, the Babylonians for the base 60 time system we still use today, and maybe the Egyptians for papyrus, if the research is indeed printed on actual paper.

Some countries' education systems reward parroting

[hey!]

Some countries place a high premium on memorizing and repeating back the teacher's words. These countries still produce their share of good and bad engineers, but they're sometimes bad in unrecognizable ways.

I once hired a software engineer from a third world country who had an encyclopedic knowledge of design patterns. You could name any pattern in the GoF *Design Patterns* book and he could reel off the UML without hesitation and give a convincing sounding explanation of how the pattern worked. But when I started inspecting his code, I quickly realized he had no understanding of what any of it meant. It was just pictures and words he'd memorized, an impressive and prodigious feat, but ultimately useless to me.

Now I should say I've hired some very good software engineers from this country; it's not that they don't make good engineers over there. For most people the discipline to absorb a lot of information yields many benefits. But this guy was an outlier; he managed to get a master's degree over there in a subject he had no practical understanding of whatsoever.