FLICKR, BRADY WITHERSThis winter, I received a request to participate in a survey to identify the “top ethical and industry concerns of those at the helm of scholarly journals.” The survey was sponsored by iParadigms LLC, the company that sells iThenticate, a service to identify plagiarism in scientific publications. Since I am editor-in-chief of Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, a journal that uses iThenticate software to check for plagiarism, I considered taking the survey. Reading through the questions, however, I felt that the survey was “rigged”—designed in such a way that plagiarism would undoubtedly come out as the top concern—so I declined to submit my responses.
In April, I listened to an iThenticate-sponsored webinar, moderated by Jason Chu of iParadigms’ website plagiarism.org, in which invited speakers Virginia Barbour, council chair at the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and David Moher, editor-in-chief at the journal Systematic Reviews, discussed the results of the survey. Not surprisingly, the top concern—cited by 82 percent of the editors and editorial staff who responded to the survey—was “plagiarism and misconduct.” However, throughout the webinar and in the summary published online at the iThenticate website, this choice was referred to only as “plagiarism.” Data falsification or manipulation, which I consider to be much more serious transgressions than plagiarism, were not highlighted by iThenticate as major concerns, despite clearly falling under the umbrella of research misconduct. This confirmed my ...
