Prof. Dr. Debora Weber-WulffFotopedia cc-by-nc, Georges van Hoegaerden, 2009

A Breakdown in Communication: Journal Reactions to Information about Plagiarism and Duplicate

World Conference on Academic Integrity 2019 - 2019-06-02

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Debora Weber-Wulff• Professor for Media and Computing at the HTW Berlin

• PhD in theoretical computer science 1996

• Plagiarism researcher since 2002

• Active with the German plagiarism documentation group VroniPlag Wiki since 2011

• I inform universities about cases of plagiarism in dissertations and habilitations with a documentation of the extent of the plagiarism.

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Note: This is as yet unpublished research

Deepest thanks to a collaborator who wishesto remain unnamed.

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Orderinchaos, 2016 [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)],

from Wikimedia Commons

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Original plan• Are there plagiarisms in large open-access databases of journal

publications?

• How difficult is it to find them?

• Do journals react differently than universities?

�4Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R68087 / CC-BY-SA

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The corpus consisted of• PubMed Central: open-access full-text biomedical publications

900.000 articles (Dec 2014) + 100.000 later on

• Other online journals:OMICS publications, E-Century, Austin Publishing

• Wikipedia

�5Flickr, cc-by-nc-nd, t_buchtele, 2009

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Software cannot determine plagiarism!

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What papers are problematic?• Duplicate publications

Same paper with at least one author in common republished in the same or different journal

• Papers with heavy text recyclingOne or more of the original authors re-uses large portions of text without proper reference

• PlagiarismsCompletely different authors copy an entire paper or large portions thereof, or combines a number of publications with perhaps superficial changes. Subclass: Template plagiarism

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Three phases for identifying problematic papers• Pairwise comparison of complete documents

with all others (not just title and abstract) to determine similarity

• Manual filtering, as not all similarity is problematic (pre-prints, reprints, guidelines, editorial board lists, etc.)

• Manual selection and verification

• This process does not identify all problematic papers, it only selects some.

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CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/

w/index.php?curid=370878

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Documenting the text overlap• A tool produces a colored side-by-side report

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https://people.f4.htw-berlin.de/~weberwu/simtexter/app.html

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Who to contact?• Which journal published second?

• Where is the journal home page?

• Where is an email?

• The target group for many journals appears to be primarily authors, not readers!

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Who to contact?• Which journal published second?

• Where is the journal home page?

• Where is an email?

• The target group for many journals appears to be primarily authors, not readers!

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Response?• Some respond the next day

• Others never answered my email, even after repeated emails

• Some thanked me

• Some appeared to be bothered by my reports

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CC-0, viaWikimedia Commons

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The apparent message?• We don’t care about the academic record!

We just want to minimize our workload.

• It takes time to deal with problematic papers, and there is no income generated from that time.

• Some editors mentioned the COPE guidelines, what are these?

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Wikimedia Commons - Bilboq [Public domain]

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COPE Guidelines: Duplicate Publication and Plagiarism

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COPE Guidelines: Duplicate Publication and Plagiarism

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COPE Guidelines: Duplicate Publication and Plagiarism

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COPE Guidelines: Duplicate Publication and Plagiarism

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COPE workflow• The COPE workflow is more often honoured in the breach than in

the observance!

• 114 open access biomedical journals were informed about 162 cases of duplicate publication or plagiarism.

• Only 12 of these cases followed the COPE guidelines completely.

• Although at least 21 editors spoke of COPE in their correspondence with me, there were over 50 different exceptions to this communication pattern, some with grave consequences for the whistleblower, many with consequences for the scientific community.

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• #1: Finding a contact

• #2: Communication with the editor

• #3: Seeing any action on the part of the journal

Challenges in Communication

Willem van de Poll [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

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Challenge #1: Finding a contact• Journal has been discontinued or is with a new publisher.

• No obvious contact given on web pages for misconduct concerns.

• Some journals only have online contact forms.

• Emails bounce, telephones are not answered.

• Published editor-in-chief is not or no longer affiliated with journal.

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Laptop computer, CC-BY©Start up Stock Photos via StockSnap io

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Challenge #2: Communication with the editors• Almost a third of journals with a published email never answered me.

• Some editors no longer (or never were) associated with the journal, but still listed on the web page.

• More than one was co-author of the problematic paper but did not see a conflict-of-interest situation!

• Write an editorial for us!

• Text overlap is “natural” or “normal”.

• But we used software, there can’t be plagiarism!�17

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Challenge #2: Communication with the editors• The most troubling communication issue was the breach of

confidentiality.

• My email was forwarded to a corresponding author.

• I was included in CC in letters to a corresponding author.

• My name was published four different times on retraction notices without my knowledge or permission. Three mentioned me and my affiliation in the notice text, one has me listed as the author in the metadata at PubMed.

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Challenge #2: Communication with the editors• The most troubling communication issue was the breach of

confidentiality.

• My email was forwarded to a corresponding author.

• I was included in CC in letters to a corresponding author.

• My name was published four different times on retraction notices without my knowledge or permission. Three mentioned me and my affiliation in the notice text, one has me listed as the author in the metadata at PubMed.

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That means that I get a lot of spam

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Challenge #3: Observing any action by the journal• There has been quite a bit of

bibliometrics research done in an attempt to assess the incidence and prevalence of retractions in the scientific record.

• The problem is that literature searches usually include the word “retraction” or “correction”, or look for a retraction marker in meta data.

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Flickr, cc-by-nc-nd, Athena1970, 2008

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Challenge #3: Observing any action by the journal• As Bakker & Riegelmann (2018) have recently noted, it is exceedingly

difficult to determine if a specific paper has been retracted because of the inconsistent handling of corrections, notices of concern, or retractions.

• Even if a journal paper is marked as problematic, information about the issues seldom makes its way back to the various databases that have stored copies of the metadata.

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Bakker, C., & Riegelman, A. (2018). Retracted Publications in Mental Health Literature: Discovery across Bibliographic Platforms. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2199

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What goes wrong when informing the community?• Confusing or incorrect wording in the notice.

• Twelve papers were simply removed from the internet.

• Two papers were replaced by completely different papers.

• Some papers were marked at the journal only, others only at PubMed.

• Two were removed from the table of contents, but still accessible, unmarked, via URL.

• In about half of the cases in which there was visible action, I was not informed by the editor of the action taken.

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Lessons to be learned• Whistleblowers can't tell the difference between an on-going

investigation and a dropped one.

• Other readers cannot easily tell if a paper has problems without an expression of concern.

• Authors must realize that deliberate duplicate publication is academic misconduct.

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Lessons to be learned: Journal Editors• Invest the time needed for good communication with all participants

and a well-documented workflow.

• Respect the confidentiality of readers pointing out problems.

• Don’t blindly trust the results of software systems.

=> The reputation of the journal is at stake!

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Thank you! Questions? • Home page:

www.f4.htw-berlin.de/~weberwu/

• Plagiarism Portal:plagiat.htw-berlin.de

• Plagiarism Blog:copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com

• Book:False Feathers. A Perspective on Academic Plagiarism. Springer. 2014

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(c) 2018 HTW Berlin / Nikolas Fahlbusch