iThenticate Blog

The United States Office of Research Integrity (ORI), in an effort to maintain tighter controls on plagiarism in the scientific community, recently ruled that Gerald Lushington, the director of bioinformatics at Kansas University in Lawrence, was guilty of plagiarism and research misconduct for not reporting a case of plagiarized material he had spotted in a research paper. His associate director, Mahesh Visvanathan, the person who submitted the plagiarized work, was also censured for misconduct.

With access to written work at the fingertips of millions of people online, instances of plagiarism have dramatically risen in recent years. Many bloggers and social media voices are unaware of how (or why) to give proper attribution to the original author or source. Ideas on how to do so have been considered over the years -- e.g. inline source links -- for how to ensure that authors receive credit for their work, but none have been completely effective in citing the original source.

As with most infractions – intentional plagiarism isn’t often a singular event.  If someone plagiarizes and gets away with it, they are very likely to do it again because no negative reinforcement has emerged to block their actions.  In fact, they are rewarded by their actions because they end up doing less work and getting all the credit for it.

In most industries, problems start at the highest corporate level and trickle downstream to the lower levels of a company. Corporate and legal regulations are purposefully enforced to prevent problems from going upstream – starting with a low level worker and then going on to affect management, executives and investors. These measures are in place so that a company’s organizational hierarchy doesn’t collapse at the drop of a dime.

Research misconduct can cause damage in many ways. Institutions, publishers and patients can all be affected by the misconduct of a single researcher. A recent case that involves a researcher at Duke University could go down in history as one of the biggest medical research frauds ever.

The Journal Register Company recently took on plagiarism at one of its Connecticut publications in a very unique way. After two incidents of plagiarism in a time span of three months, the editor of the Journal Register’s Connecticut papers, Matt DeRienzo, decided to utilize an evaluation technique employed in middle schools across the country: a pop quiz.

You’d think that when you’re buying from a company as prestigious as Amazon that you could avoid plagiarism, but unfortunately, the theft of intellectual property and manuscripts rears its ugly head even in the most legitimate business circles. When buying reading material for your Kindle, you might be getting the real deal from a genuine author, or you could be getting a pirated version that someone else downloaded, copied, and repackaged.

iThenticate has launched a search function on its website that identifies journals and content partners that use iThenticate to check for originality and plagiarism through the CrossCheck user community.

The iThenticate comparison database contains millions of items that editors screen against to detect plagiarism and other types of misconduct. By searching on iThenticate.com, visitors can find 70,000+ publications that use iThenticate, and over 30+ million scholarly articles, books and conference proceedings that have been indexed in the iThenticate database.

“The depth and breadth of scholarly content in our comparison database is truly massive,” said Chris Cross, general manager of iThenticate. “So, we have built this search capability as a tool to assist our existing customers as well as those exploring our solution for the first time. It will help them to cull through our content sources more easily and identify the content sources they care most about. For example, a customer that wishes to submit an article for publication to a particular journal can now very quickly determine if that journal uses iThenticate. Or, when submitting a document for comparison, the new search function allows that customer to quickly determine if a particular content source is part of our indexed reference database. This will provide our customers with additional confidence that the documents they are submitting for comparison are being compared against the content sources they care most about.”

Searchers can find journals by name, title or subject. Try searching now!

This news and more were announced in the January 2012 edition of the iThenticate plagiarism newsletter. Sign up for the free newsletter.

Earlier this month Hungarian President Pal Schmitt was accused of plagiarizing his 1992 doctoral thesis. The controversary has heated up as several hundred demonstrators gathered on Saturday calling for his resignation, and claiming he is unfit to be in office.

According to HVG, 180 pages of Schmitt’s 215 page thesis was a "word-for-word translation" of a text written in French by Bulgarian sports historian and diplomat, Nikolai Georgiev (now deceased), who reportedly collaborated on research projects with Schmitt in the 1980s at Budapest Sports University.

President Pal Schmitt has rejected charges of plagiarism. According to Politics.hu, he said that “the paper had been based on primary data, using 21 source materials altogether... the basic material he drew on, some of which was also made use of by the Bulgarian Nikolay Georgiev, was not anyone’s intellectual property.”