How to catch a cheat: an editor's perspective on a new age of plagiarism and data manipulation

Abstract

With the greater availability in the past decade of software that quickly and efficiently scans the literature for duplication, there has been increased awareness by the public of the issue of plagiarism. A famous, recent case is that of the former German Defense Minister whose doctoral title was revoked because he reportedly plagiarized a large portion of his doctoral thesis. There have been numerous other such text ‘copy-paste’ incidents in other countries as well. Just as readily, it has become easy to manipulate and transfer data from one figure into another, as long as the end product supports the story the author wants to tell. We would like to discuss here the types of cheating we have encountered over the past few years as journal editors and highlight what we think should be done about it. Some 25 years ago, when we were students and post-docs, we learned that copying the text of others word-for-word was taboo; the ‘P-word’ carried a huge stigma that in most cases was deterrent enough. Besides, the effort involved in copying the text out of the book by hand was almost as much as reformulating it in your own words. Summarizing what we had read and citing the original source was the proper way to do it. Nowadays, however, using …