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.”

The latest case of breaking misconduct news comes out of the University of Connecticut.  Dr. Dipak Das is the director of the UConn Health Center’s Cardiovascular Researcher Center, and is best known for his groundbreaking research on resveratrol, the chemical agent found in red wine that has been touted to benefit health in a number of ways.

Scientific Community in Serbia Brings Attention to Widespread Plagiarism with iThenticate Study

Looking back at events that took place during the past year is one of favorite things to do. This year I am recounting a few of the best plagiarism events in 2011.

The relationship between authors and publishers has been rapidly evolving along with the digital age.  Many authors have taken to publishing their own books through large online e-book sellers like Amazon and distributing on platforms like the Kindle and iPad.  Not only do services like these provide streamlined publishing and distribution pathways, but they also offer authors a larger cut of profits than they would get with a traditional publisher.

Techdirt recently published a very interesting article that examines the current state of copyright in academia.  Building off of an article from QuestionCopyright, Techdirt columnist Glyn Moody poses the question of whether copyright is being effectively utilized for academics.  The logic essentially says that academics are more interested in getting attribution for the ideas in their papers, rather than protecting the paper's specific wording.

I had the opportunity to speak with Eric Kissel of the University Corporation of Atmospheric Research (UCAR), an intergovernmental body within the IPCC, who discussed how iThenticate has enabled them to block plagiarism from their assessment reports.

Journalists and bloggers seem to be at the forefront of the fight against literary plagiarism it seems. With the recent exposure of several high profile and respected authors and the shock felt about this in the literary world, a watershed has been reached. Hodder & Stoughton’s statement on one notorious case set a benchmark for others in the publishing industry: