[visionlist] [External] Re: Plagiarism checks in Empirical Manuscripts

[Johnson, Chris A]

Jim, you have company in this regard.  Many years ago, I was one of the initial investigators in the development and evaluation of a diagnostic visual field procedure (frequency doubling technology perimetry).  The initial studies were performed on a single prototype device in my laboratory that was later transferred to the clinic.  The prototype remained in my hands the whole time.  Later on, another investigator from another country in Europe submitted a paper related to this device. I assume that the testing was performed on the device that was commercially available at that time, but in the methods section, there were several paragraphs that were word for word copied from our original paper, which basically described the prototype device.  This was pointed out to the editor and the author in the review that I sent in for this paper.  In spite of this, the same word for word description of the prototype device (still never having left my possession) appeared in at least 6-8 additional papers submitted by this author.  Because a colleague of mine and I were some of the initial investigators in the development and evaluation of this procedure, we were often called upon to review papers using this device.  I am amazed that the author continued to plagiarize our methodology after having been told that this could not have been possible and was definite plagiarism !!

In this view, I am very pleased that some of the journals are now using this software that looks for instances of plagiarism, and I hope that the editors can assess cases where suggestions of plagiarism may be present to avoid any unpleasant circumstances and to provide a more objective evaluation of the situation.  Given the incentives for some individuals to cut and paste information from publications to create new articles to pad their CVs, the growing incidence of predatory journals and related issues, it is sad that these issues are occurring.  Conflict of interest, full disclosure, and scientific and clinical honesty are being compromised.  Those of us who try to live by these principals need to take an active role in maintaining research integrity.

I will close with two comments: (1) For many years at ARVO, when presenting a paper or poster, I would wear a t-shirt that said “When all else fails, manipulate the data”.  Obviously, it was intended as a joke, but unfortunately some colleagues seem to accept this undertaking. (2) Many years ago (in the 1950s) Vance Packard wrote a book called “The Hidden Persuaders”.  It was written at a time when Olympic athletes were extolling the benefits of smoking a few cigarettes before an important race or other event.  It goes into the slow, subtle approach that the advertising industry uses to alter public opinion.  I would recommend it as interesting reading, because many of the issues that are discussed in that book are relevant to our current state of affairs.


Regards,



Chris




Chris A. Johnson, Ph.D., D.Sc., FAAO, FARVO
Professor, Department of Ophthalmology
Director, Visual Field Reading Center
University of Iowa
200 Hawkins Drive
Iowa City, IA  52242-1091

phone: 319-356-0384
cell: 319-400-2987
email: chris-a-johnson at uiowa.edu

From: visionlist <visionlist-bounces at visionscience.com> on behalf of Jim Ferwerda <jaf at cis.rit.edu>
Date: Monday, July 10, 2017 at 8:31 PM
To: Robert Sekuler <sekuler at brandeis.edu>
Cc: "visionlist at visionscience.com" <visionlist at visionscience.com>
Subject: [External] Re: [visionlist] Plagiarism checks in Empirical Manuscripts

I too had a “funny” experience relative to journal plagiarism.

A few years back I wanted to look at a paper I had presented/published several years before at Human Vision and Electronic Imaging. Rather than dig through my computer, I googled the paper title: “Three Varieties of Realism in Computer Graphics”. The paper came up as the first hit, but several hits down was a paper titled “Hi-Fidelity Computer Graphics" published in the “International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology”. Since I was intrigued, I downloaded the paper and started reading. After a page of introduction, the text became strangely familiar. The “authors” of the paper had cut-and-pasted four pages of the eight page document directly from my paper!

After doing some further investigation I found that the three authors (M.S. students at an obscure Indian university) had done this several times, “borrowing” from different published papers and switching up the author order, with the goal of padding their CV’s. Some further reading revealed that sadly, this is a widespread practice in some countries/fields, and that there are many “pay-to-play” journals that will publish whatever they are given as long as the publishing fee is received.

So who knows, you, like me, might have more co-authors than you think!

Cheers

-Jim

p.s. In case you're interested in padding /your/ CV the website for the journal is

http://ijirt.org/

Submission is easy. Make sure to have your credit card ready!


On Jul 10, 2017, at 3:46 PM, Robert Sekuler <sekuler at brandeis.edu<mailto:sekuler at brandeis.edu>> wrote:

I had a funny experience being flagged for possible plagiarism.

The journal's very thorough plagiarism detector reported that a high proportion of my submission was duplicated from a document that it found on the web.

No surprise, though. Turns out the duplicated article was an early draft of the submitted article that I had posted on my website. And the editor immediately understood what had happened. No harm done.

Bob sekuler

----------------------------
Professor of Neuroscience
F & L Salvage Professor of Psychology
Brandeis University


On Jul 10, 2017, at 14:46, Horowitz, Todd (NIH/NCI) [E] <todd.horowitz at nih.gov<mailto:todd.horowitz at nih.gov>> wrote:
To be blunt, I would like to know the name of the journal. Any journal with such shoddy editorial practices should be avoided.

Thanks
Todd Horowitz


From: "Persike, Malte" <persike at uni-mainz.de<mailto:persike at uni-mainz.de>>
Date: Monday, July 10, 2017 at 10:59 AM
To: "visionlist at visionscience.com<mailto:visionlist at visionscience.com>" <visionlist at visionscience.com<mailto:visionlist at visionscience.com>>
Subject: [visionlist] Plagiarism checks in Empirical Manuscripts

Dear Vision Community,

during publishing of a recent manuscript, I received a request from the editorial office to alter a number of sections in said manuscript. The request was triggered by an automated plagiarism check using CrossCheck. The whole process left me so puzzled that I thought I‘d share my experience here, combined with a humble request for a broader debate about the issue of plagiarism in empirical research.

First, what happened? The report contained a whopping 24 different items, each asserting plagiarism of the works of others. The email from the editorial office was phrased accordingly. It asked to “amend the affected sections by either identifying the fact that it has been reproduced or by using original words”, thus presuming all 24 instances of supposed plagiarism to be veridical. Most of them were not.

After a very thorough debate about all 24 items with my co-authors and an expert for good scientific conduct at our university’s library, 22 out of all 24 items were discarded. The remaining 2 items were far from verbatim copies of whole sections. They were small parts of larger sentences together with explicit citations of the sources from which those parts were derived. The other 22 items were discarded not due to subjective reasoning but due to obvious glitches in the plagiarism checking algorithms. This amounts to a rate of 91.6% false positives. I’ll describe some of the more silly instances at the end of this text, but that is not the reason for my posting here.

Instead, the point I very much like to discuss with you is the handling of possible plagiarism in empirical studies. Do we have an agreed code of conduct for authoring pieces of empirical science? Let me highlight only a few points.

1) How do we treat Materials and Methods? The Stimuli section will necessarily contain similar phrasings when reporting about research that uses identical paradigms. The Apparatus section will also be quite similar between related studies, as will the Participants section. The same holds for the Ethics Statement and the Measures and Analysis. Is it really desirable that we need to come up with ever so slightly different formulations for identical things, only to avoid verbatim copies? Are there not limitations as to how a temporal 2-AFC task can be described with appropriate brevity? And would it – particularly for Methods and Results –perhaps even be prudent to stick to a rather formulaic language protocol in order to make reception easier? I for one would certainly not wish to read a Methods section which goes like “Stimuli were created according to XY (2004). Handling of Participants was similar to XY (2010). Apparatus was as described in XY (1998). Task was taken from XY (2001). Analysis and measures are according to XY (1992).” This does not help me to efficiently understand what’s being done.

2) How do we handle self-citations? Many of us work on the same topics over long stretches of time, sometimes decades. Good scientific research usually means to advance present knowledge step by step, pulling only very few levers at once for each new experiment. Is it not to be expected that at some point we have arrived at concise, well-formulated, and most comprehensible ways to verbally introduce specific concepts. Is it really necessary that we find ever new ways to phrase the exact same ideas?

3) Is it the prime virtue of empirical research to be phrased originally? Is it not first and foremost the results and their implications that define original and interesting work? Even if we set high standards of originality for the prose in empirical articles, how should brief verbatim copies be handled? Let me give one example. Suppose, the abstract of a paper reads like “We used faces, non-face objects, Gabors, and colored Gaussian blobs to investigate the role of stimulus complexity on visual processing.” I find it highly questionable to then have a sentence like “XY (2001) used faces, non-face objects, Gabors, and colored Gaussian blobs to investigate the role of stimulus complexity.”, written by another author, qualify as plagiarism or needing quotes. Why should the latter author attempt to rephrase something that had already been so concisely summarized by the original authors?

4) Is it common consensus that automated plagiarism checking without editorial oversight is the yardstick against which to evaluate the originality of scientific manuscripts?

I’d very much love to have an informed discussion with you. In part because I imagine that the plagiarism report I received may turn out to be the rule rather than the exception, hence we might all face hours of checking and re-checking during future publishing attempts.

Kind regards to all of you
  Malte Persike

--

And here come some of the highlights from the plagiarism report issued to me.

(i) My institutional address “Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Wallstr. 3, D-55122 Mainz, Germany” and the immediately following heading “Abstract” were flagged as plagiarism.

(ii) The E-Mail addresses of the authors were flagged as a plagiarism.

(iii) Citations and year numbers, e.g. “(Persike et al., 2015)” were included in the word count for multiple items. This had ridiculous consequences. To name only two of the most blatant ones: one plagiarism item was defined by the words “Author et al., 1993 […] et al. […] the […] et al., 1997” (with a few unflagged words inbetween), another item was defined by the words “Author1 and Author2, 1994; Author3 and Author4, 2001) and”.

(iv) Mathematical symbols, brand names and notational terms had been included in the report. One item therefore consisted almost entirely of parts of a mathematical formula, the product names “ViSaGe” and “ColorCal colorimeter”, the brand name “Cambridge Research Systems LLC”, the term “Michelson contrast”, and the phrase “were run in Matlab”.

(v) Many of the report items contained common phrases used in neuroscience research, some of which were even multiply counted. For example, one item was defined by the mere phrase “to the ability of the visual system”, counted two times, plus a reference. A quick Google search turned up more than 150,000 hits for this exact phrase and Google Scholar yields more than a hundred authors who have also used this phrase in their works.

(vi) The CrossCheck system invented false positives. One item contained the phrase “V2 neurons are highly selective”, another item referred to the phrase “to a particular combination of line components”. These phrases were not copied from anywhere but are original. In fact, they are so original that Google Scholar yields precisely zero search results for each of them. The sources from where these phrases were claimed to be derived do not include such sequences of words anywhere in the entire texts.


--
Dr. Malte Persike

Department for Statistical Methods
Psychological Institute
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Wallstr. 3
D-55122 Mainz

fon:    +49 (6131) 39 39260
fax:    +49 (6131) 39 39186
mobile: +49 (1525) 4223363



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