{"id":225357,"date":"2016-10-03T17:57:46","date_gmt":"2016-10-03T20:57:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/?p=225357"},"modified":"2016-10-03T17:57:46","modified_gmt":"2016-10-03T20:57:46","slug":"when-plagiarism-doesnt-appear-to-involve-bad-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/when-plagiarism-doesnt-appear-to-involve-bad-faith\/","title":{"rendered":"When plagiarism doesn\u2019t appear to involve bad faith"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"BoasPraticasDaniel Bueno<\/span>A recent consultation submitted to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), a research ethics forum for publishers of scientific journals, illustrated the challenges of fairly evaluating suspected cases of plagiarism.\u00a0 The publisher of a scientific periodical, the identity and origin of which were not disclosed, reported to COPE that it had begun using special software to detect plagiarism and had recorded a high incidence of short passages or sequences of sentences copied from other articles.\u00a0 The problem affects 30% to 50% of the manuscripts submitted and in some papers even compromises the originality of as much as one-third of the text.<\/p>\n

Although it may seem shocking, according to the publisher the authors do not seem to be acting in bad faith, since the copied sentences were short and came from more than 60\u2014in one case, from more than 120\u2014different sources.\u00a0 \u201cIt is as if copying a segment containing what is thought to be an elegant turn of phrase might make up for the inadequacy of the researcher\u2019s linguistic competence,\u201d wrote the publisher, referring to the large number of authors for whom English is not their native language.\u00a0 \u201cAt any rate, it is unacceptable that one-third of the passages in a text could be inspired by other sources.\u00a0 It is not what we consider good practice in scientific writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

COPE responded to the consultation by recommending a case-by-case analysis that takes into account the characteristics of the recycled text.\u00a0 Duplication in the results section is more serious than when the offense occurs in the introduction or methods sections.\u00a0 Phrases copied in a review article that is composed of critical evaluations of existing literature compromise text originality more than do duplicated sentences that appear in a traditional paper, one that reports unprecedented results.\u00a0 According to the forum, a publisher should demand explanations from an author who has failed to attribute authorship in too many segments of the article and should take more drastic action when the ideas defended by the author belong to other people.<\/p>\n

\u201cPublishers should continue to check all the manuscripts using anti-plagiarism software and reject articles that have a moderate or large incidence of superimposition of texts,\u201d suggests COPE.\u00a0 The institution with which the author is affiliated should be warned if there is, in fact, a suspicion of misconduct or if the publisher obtains evidence that the researcher is working in an environment that does not observe good scientific practices.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the authors are young researchers, a publisher could ask them to re-write the copied passages and submit the article again,\u201d COPE recommends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When plagiarism doesn\u2019t appear to involve bad faith","protected":false},"author":475,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[155],"tags":[],"coauthors":[785],"class_list":["post-225357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-good-practices"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/475"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225357"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=225357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}