Scientists explain why they plagiarize
— -- Scientists don't often turn the microscope on themselves, and when they do, the results sometimes prove disappointing.
"It's just too easy to cut and paste these days," says Harold Garner of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, an expert of scientific plagiarism.
In a report in the current journal Science, his team lists excuses offered by "potential" plagiarists, authors of studies in which the text was, on average, 86.2% similar to previously-published work. Last year, the same team reported in Nature that a sample of the federal government's PubMed database of studies suggests about 1 in 200 papers is plagiarized.
"Over time, the responses just got crazier and crazier," says Tara Long, Garner's colleague at Texas Southwestern. "There's every excuse in the book, from 'my hard drive crashed' to 'the other guy did it.' "
The team used a computer program they wrote called "eTBLAST" (available online) to detect about 9,000 suspicious duplicates from PubMed. The team then sent out 163 questionnaires to potential plagiarists and authors of copied works on the list, and to editors of the journals that published the studies. They received 144 replies.
"The reactions by the respondents were intense and diverse," notes the study, with 93% of the plagiarism victims unaware and "appreciative." Potential plagiarists were "more varied" in their responses:
•28% denied plagiarism
•35% admitted wrongdoing and expressed remorse
•22% were from co-authors "claiming no involvement in the writing of the manuscript."
•Others claimed they didn't know their names were on the studies.
"It was a joke, a bad game, an unconscious bet between friends, 10 years ago that such things ... happened. I deeply regret," was one duplicate paper author's response.
"That's my favorite," Long says. The team found the regretful jokester had eight other duplicate papers and was the head of an ethics committee in his country.
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