Software Finds Plagiarism In Research 111
shmG writes "Researchers from the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute have created a seek-and-destroy program — for plagiarism. Called ET Blast, it's designed to find plagiarism in scientific papers. It does a full-text analysis, and then looks for similar publications in several databases. 'We have better literature,' Garner said. 'There are abstracts and full papers, and a database called Crisp, where you compare stuff to every grant the NIH gets. It's compared to any research that's been funded.'"
How is this different from Turnitin? (Score:5, Informative)
This sounds almost exactly like turnitin.com where when one uploads a paper to it, it searches almost anything it can get ahold of and will list any text in any academic journal that is copied verbatim.
Re:You can't plagiarize yourself [Re:What about .. (Score:3, Informative)
I actually ran into this in grad school. When writing a tech related paper, I referenced one of my past papers on the same subject as a source. My professor made it clear I had to cite myself to avoid "self-plagiarism". I thought it quite possibly the stupidest thing I had ever heard in my life, and it was coming from a celebrated PhD at a major New England university.
Re:How is this different from Turnitin? (Score:1, Informative)
Those cunts @ turnitin archive *YOUR* paper for eternity (without payment and without any course for redress) to achieve network effects and enhance their service.
Re:What about ... (Score:2, Informative)
if you resubmit your own work, it's not plagiarism.
Let me clarify the issue for those not accustomed to the rules of scientific publishing.
There IS a thing as self-plagarism, and it's not necessarily a minor offense. At it's core, if you submit essentially the same work to multiple venues with the intent to pass each off as an independent body of work when they are not, then there is intent to deceive and that is an ethical breach of conduct. Worst case scenario, the author list and abstract has been changed just enough that it leads others to believe this particular experiment has actually been independently confirmed and duplicated when it has not.
Most journals require that you affirm that the same manuscript is not currently under consideration for publication in another journal and has not already been published in a highly similar form elsewhere (except maybe as a conference abstract). This is different than re-submission, where a manuscript was rejected from one publication and you are now free to send to to another venue. And then there is the copyright issue, that as authors you are not necessarily the sole copyright holder (often the journal has some claim), in which case a duplicate publication is actually a violation of the journal's copyright.
There is also the case where one, comprehensive study is artificially split into smaller, less meaningful sub studies with the intent to pad publication counts (there was an example of a prenatal intervention study where the effects on the mothers and on the infants for the exact same study were published separately without any reference to each other, diminishing the usefulness of the study). This is now not a copyright issue but now a scientific integrity issue, presumably the medical audience of such a study could be harmed by not being told both sets of outcomes for the same study in any sort of obvious way.
There is an excellent resource on what constitutes scientific plagarism (including self-plagarism) here: http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~roigm/plagiarism/Self%20plagiarism.html [stjohns.edu]