Plagiarists beware

Written byBob Grant

| 1 min read

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We here at __The Scientist__ do our best to keep an eye out for instances of scientific misconduct and publishing irregularities. In the past we've not only reported on linkurl:Woo-suk Hwang's;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/53460/ fraudulent human cloning research, but we've brought you news of other misconduct, such as the Egyptian paleontologist who allegedly linkurl:plagiarized;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/20040922/02/ previously published photos. We may have a lot less scandal to report on in the near future, given last week's announcement by the linkurl:Committee on Publication Ethics;http://www.publicationethics.org.uk/ of the June launch of a new plagiarism detection service called CrossCheck. According to a story to appear tomorrow (Apr 12) in the __British Medical Journal__, scientific journal editors can sign up for CrossCheck, which is being offered by citation linking network linkurl:CrossRef,;http://www.crossref.org/ to automatically check manuscripts they receive against a database of already published work. Already, eight publishers - including Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, the BMJ Group, Taylor and Francis, and the __New England Journal of Medicine__ - have agreed to sign on to the service, which will compare "text fingerprints" from manuscripts to other works in the database. If the service works, editors might catch plagiarism before publishing papers. The service will not, however, catch instances of linkurl:image;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/23156/ fraud, such as the plagiarism allegedly perpetrated by Mostafa Mansour Imam, the Egyptian paleontologist, and at least one of Hwang's missteps. So maybe __The Scientist__ will still have some misconduct fodder for our news stories.

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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