Daniel BuenoIn an editorial published in the journal Nature, Indian physicist Praveen Chaddah made a controversial suggestion about the treatment of scientific articles that have been shown to include content plagiarized from other texts. Chaddah argues that if the plagiarism does not involve the description of the results or the methodology, but relates only to passages that do not compromise the veracity and persuasiveness of the research, publishing a prominently-placed correction instead of disqualifying the entire article and removing it from circulation, as is done now, would be sufficient. Cancellation of the publication of an article, i.e., retraction, “removes useful and original results from scientific records,” Chaddah says. In his opinion, plagiarized passages are commonly found in the introductory paragraphs or conclusion of an article merely because the author has not mastered the English language well enough to express the concept in a different way.
Chaddah acknowledges that plagiarism is an unethical practice, but argues that scientists are different from writers. “We attach more value to the originality of the ideas than to the originality of the language,” he says. “There are much worse offenses than plagiarizing a text, such as taking credit for someone else’s idea. That is more difficult to detect than to discover that someone copied or pasted an excerpt from another source into his paper,” says Chaddah, who himself has been a victim of improper appropriations of ideas from articles he had published.
The proposal was received with reservations. “Plagiarism is incompatible with ethical behavior—with creativity, imagination, and originality, which are the pillars of science,” observes researcher Pedro Cantos, of the University of Extramadura, Spain. Sonia Vasconcelos, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a student of research integrity, does not think all cases of plagiarism justify a retraction, but disagrees with Chaddah. “The author considers that plagiarism of ideas and results is more serious than plagiarism of texts. But there are many situations where the plagiarized text incorporates valuable ideas and hypotheses developed by the original author. It seems wrong to me to assume that improper appropriation of texts is a ‘milder form of plagiarism’ in the context of research,” she says.
Vasconcelos also disagrees with Chaddah’s statement that “scientists are not writers,” saying that “scientific communication is an integral part of a researcher’s activity. To simplify at one and the same time the task performed by a writer and the plagiarizing of a text seems, as I see it, to encourage the idea that writing up one’s research is secondary, besides indirectly disparaging the expertise of independent science writers. Writing scientific texts is more than regurgitating facts and ideas.”
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