iThenticate Blog

Part 1 - Scholarly Publishing - Economic Impact

Dan Kimber, a former columnist at Glendale News-Press, who was accused and found guilty of plagiarism back in 2003, just published his first blog post on Montrose Patch.

Three Wiley-Blackwell nursing journals, The Journal of Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, the Journal of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners and Perspectives in Psychiatric Care, recently detected cases of plagiarism in published articles written by Professor Scott J.M. Weber, a now former assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing. After investigation, Wiley-Blackwell issued a retraction of seven articles after concluding Weber had liberally borrowed previously published research without attribution.

Original audio broadcast can be found on IASTED.org.  Brandon Hisey from The International Association of Science and Technology for Development (IASTED) and Dan Videtto from iThenticate / iParadigms (former Managing Director) have a discussion on IASTED Live!

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with iThenticate customer, Brett Holte, who is the Submissions Services Manager at the Alliance of Crop, Soil, and Environmental Science Societies (ACSESS). Brett gave me insight into their editorial process, describing how it has changed since discovering plagiarism in submitted articles and implementing iThenticate. Mr. Holte also offers his advice to other scientific, technical and medical (STM) journals for preventing plagiarism before publication.

Writers often maintain that because they are the authors, they can reuse their work as they please; it couldn't be defined as "plagiarism" since they are not taking any words or ideas from someone else. However, while the debate on whether self-plagiarism is possible continues, the ethics of self-plagiarism is significant, especially because self-plagiarism can infringe upon a publisher’s copyright.

It’s been only a few months since German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg resigned after being accused of plagiarizing his doctorate. Now two more German politicians have resigned and been stripped of their Ph.D’s as a result of plagiarism.

Last month Silvana Koch-Mehrin, a leading politician of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), and previously vice president of the European Parliament, was investigated by the The University of Heidelberg for plagiarism in her thesis, revocation of her Ph.D as the final result. According to DW-World.de, 120 passages on 80 different pages from nearly 30 different publications (and two-thirds of those not accurately cited) in her thesis were plagiarized.

Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, also a member of the Free Democrats (FDP), is the latest German politician to be revoked of his doctorate for plagiarism. The faculty at the University of Bonn invested his Ph.D thesis and found enough evidence to revoke the doctorate degree.

All three of these political figures had different excuses to the accusation of plagiarism.

Johann Hari has certainly set off a media frenzy the past two weeks challenging the definition of plagiarism. Last week it was discovered that Hari, columnist for the British newspaper the Independent and winner of the Orwell Prize, has a habit of taking statements or quotes from other reporters' interviews and inserting them into his own interview article as if the person had said it to him instead of the original reporter. Of course, without credit to the original reporter.