Patterns of text reuse in a scientific corpus

Ambiguity in Ethical Standards: Global Versus Local Science in Explaining Academic Plagiarism

The past decade has seen extensive research carried out on the systematic causes of research misconduct. Simultaneously, less attention has been paid to the variation in academic misconduct between research fields, as most empirical studies focus on one particular discipline. We propose that academic discipline is one of several systematic factors that might contribute to academic misbehavior. Drawing on a neo-institutional approach, we argue that in the developing countries, the norm of textual originality has not drawn equal support across different research fields depending on its level of internationalization. Using plagiarism detection software, we analyzed 2,405 doctoral dissertations randomly selected from all dissertations defended in Russia between 2007 and 2015. We measured the globalization of each academic discipline by calculating the share of publications indexed in the global citation database in relation to overall output. Our results showed that, with an average share of detected borrowings of over 19%, the incidence of plagiarism in Russia is remarkably higher than in Western countries. Overall, disciplines closely follow the pattern of higher globalization associated with a lower percentage of borrowed text. We also found that plagiarism is less prevalent at research-oriented institutions supporting global ethical standards. Our findings suggest that it might be misleading to measure the prevalence of academic misconduct in developing countries without paying attention to variations at the disciplinary level.

A large dataset of scientific text reuse in Open-Access publications

We present the Webis-STEREO-21 dataset, a massive collection of Scientific Text Reuse in Open-access publications. It contains 91 million cases of reused text passages found in 4.2 million unique open-access publications. Cases range from overlap of as few as eight words to near-duplicate publications and include a variety of reuse types, ranging from boilerplate text to verbatim copying to quotations and paraphrases. Featuring a high coverage of scientific disciplines and varieties of reuse, as well as comprehensive metadata to contextualize each case, our dataset addresses the most salient shortcomings of previous ones on scientific writing. The Webis-STEREO-21 does not indicate if a reuse case is legitimate or not, as its focus is on the general study of text reuse in science, which is legitimate in the vast majority of cases. It allows for tackling a wide range of research questions from different scientific backgrounds, facilitating both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the phenomenon as well as a first-time grounding on the base rate of text reuse in scientific publications.

A comparative study of postgraduate theses in pedagogy and preschool education in Austria and Turkey

In this study, postgraduate theses in the fields of pedagogy and preschool education in Austria and Turkey are compared in terms of factors such as similarity index, research designs and quality of academic writing. To achieve this goal, a commonly-used web-based plagiarism detection service was used to determine the similarity indexes of 258 theses prepared in the two countries (124 from Austria, 134 from Turkey) by checking them against existing sources such as articles, theses, and books; and a relational screening model was used to determine the degree of correlation among variables. In addition, the research topics, research designs, and data collection tools employed in each thesis were identified and content analysis was performed on selected theses with an eye to gaining a sense of the methodological approaches used in pedagogy in Austrian and Turkish universities and making comparisons between the two countries. Our results suggest that the mean similarity index between the postgraduate theses in Austria is 8.78 (Std. Dev. 4.91), while the mean similarity index between the postgraduate theses prepared in Turkey is 25.10 (Std. Dev. 9.85). Our analysis indeed indicates that 91% (n 113) of the theses prepared at Austrian universities and only 13% (n 17) of the theses prepared at Turkish universities did not exceed the acceptable similarity index of 15%. The fact that 87% of the theses written in Turkey are dramatically similar to the available resources shows that many of the studies carry potential risks in terms of originality and plagiarism.

Psychological trauma and emotional upheaval as revealed in academic writing: The case of COVID-19

The current paper used a preregistered set of language dimensions to indicate how scientists psychologically managed the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects. Study 1 evaluated over 1.8 million preprints from arXiv.org and assessed how papers written during the COVID-19 pandemic reflected patterns of psychological trauma and emotional upheaval compared to those written before the pandemic. The data suggest papers written during the pandemic contained more affect and more cognitive processing terms to indicate writers working through a crisis than papers written before the pandemic. Study 2 (N = 74,744 published PLoS One papers) observed consistent emotion results, though cognitive processing patterns were inconsistent. Papers written specifically about COVID-19 contained more emotion than those not written about COVID-19. Finally, Study 3 (N = 361,189 published papers) replicated the Study 2 emotion results across more diverse journals and observed papers written during the pandemic contained a greater rate of cognitive processing terms, but a lower rate of analytic thinking, than papers written before the pandemic. These data suggest emotional upheavals are associated with psychological correlates reflected in the language of scientists at scale. Implications for psychology of language research and trauma are discussed.

Perceptions of plagiarism among PhDs across the sciences, engineering, humanities, and arts: Results from a national survey in Brazil

Plagiarism allegations are not rare in the history of science, and credit for prior work was and continues to be a source of disputes, involving notions of priority of discovery and of plagiarism. However, consensus over what constitutes plagiarism among scientists from different fields cannot be taken for granted. We conducted a national survey exploring perceptions of plagiarism among PhD holders registered in the database of the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). This survey was sent to 143,405 PhD holders across the fields, including biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and engineers as well as linguists, philosophers, and anthropologists, with a 20% response rate. The results suggest that core principles about plagiarism are shared among this multidisciplinary community, thus corroborating Robert K. Merton's observations that concerns over plagiarism and priority disputes are not field specific. This study offers insight into the way plagiarism is perceived in the research community and sheds light on the problem in the context of international collaborative research networks. The data focus on a particular research system in Latin America, but, given the cultural similarities that bind most Latin-American nations, these results may be relevant to other PhD populations in the region and should provide an opportunity for comparison with studies from other emerging, non-Anglophone regions.

Estimating the prevalence of text overlap in biomedical conference abstracts

BACKGROUND

Scientists communicate progress and exchange information via publication and presentation at scientific meetings. We previously showed that text similarity analysis applied to Medline can identify and quantify plagiarism and duplicate publications in peer-reviewed biomedical journals. In the present study, we applied the same analysis to a large sample of conference abstracts.

METHODS

We downloaded 144,149 abstracts from 207 national and international meetings of 63 biomedical conferences. Pairwise comparisons were made using eTBLAST: a text similarity engine. A domain expert then reviewed random samples of highly similar abstracts (1500 total) to estimate the extent of text overlap and possible plagiarism.

RESULTS

Our main findings indicate that the vast majority of textual overlap occurred within the same meeting (2%) and between meetings of the same conference (3%), both of which were significantly higher than instances of plagiarism, which occurred in less than .5% of abstracts.

CONCLUSIONS

This analysis indicates that textual overlap in abstracts of papers presented at scientific meetings is one-tenth that of peer-reviewed publications, yet the plagiarism rate is approximately the same as previously measured in peer-reviewed publications. This latter finding underscores a need for monitoring scientific meeting submissions - as is now done when submitting manuscripts to peer-reviewed journals - to improve the integrity of scientific communications.

Text recycling in STEM: A text-analytic study of recently published research articles

Text recycling, sometimes called "self-plagiarism," is the reuse of material from one's own existing documents in a newly created work. Over the past decade, text recycling has become an increasingly debated practice in research ethics, especially in science and technology fields. Little is known, however, about researchers' actual text recycling practices. We report here on a computational analysis of text recycling in published research articles in STEM disciplines. Using a tool we created in R, we analyze a corpus of 400 published articles from 80 federally funded research projects across eight disciplinary clusters. According to our analysis, STEM research groups frequently recycle some material from their previously published articles. On average, papers in our corpus contained about three recycled sentences per article, though a minority of research teams (around 15%) recycled substantially more content. These findings were generally consistent across STEM disciplines. We also find evidence that researchers superficially alter recycled prose much more often than recycling it verbatim. Based on our findings, which suggest that recycling some amount of material is normative in STEM research writing, researchers and editors would benefit from more appropriate and explicit guidance about what constitutes legitimate practice and how authors should report the presence of recycled material.

Flagging incorrect nucleotide sequence reagents in biomedical papers: To what extent does the leading publication format impede automatic error detection?

In an idealised vision of science the scientific literature is error-free. Errors reported during peer review are supposed to be corrected prior to publication, as further research establishes new knowledge based on the body of literature. It happens, however, that errors pass through peer review, and a minority of cases errata and retractions follow. Automated screening software can be applied to detect errors in manuscripts and publications. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we designed the erroneous reagent checking () benchmark to assess the accuracy of fact-checkers screening biomedical publications for dubious mentions of nucleotide sequence reagents. It comes with a test collection comprised of 1679 nucleotide sequence reagents that were curated by biomedical experts. Second, we benchmarked our own screening software called Seek&Blastn with three input formats to assess the extent of performance loss when operating on various publication formats. Our findings stress the superiority of markup formats (a 79% detection rate on XML and HTML) over the prominent PDF format (a 69% detection rate at most) regarding an error flagging task. This is the first published baseline on error detection involving reagents reported in biomedical scientific publications. The benchmark is designed to facilitate the development and validation of software bricks to enhance the reliability of the peer review process.

Challenges for publishing Brazilian scientific health journals

The article aims to bring to the attention of readers and potential authors some aspects of the difficulties faced by scientific editors of Public Health journals. It discusses critical aspects, highlighting the expectations of authors, readers, editors and publishers; and presents results of empirical studies on publishing predictors, types and quality of peer review, formal characteristics of the publishing process, the working process of two Brazilian and one foreign Public Health journal, ethical issues involving authors and editors, specific editorial challenges faced by Brazilian Public Health journals, and the future of publications in the open access model scenario.

Semi-automated fact-checking of nucleotide sequence reagents in biomedical research publications: The Seek & Blastn tool

Nucleotide sequence reagents are verifiable experimental reagents in biomedical publications, because their sequence identities can be independently verified and compared with associated text descriptors. We have previously reported that incorrectly identified nucleotide sequence reagents are characteristic of highly similar human gene knockdown studies, some of which have been retracted from the literature on account of possible research fraud. Because of the throughput limitations of manual verification of nucleotide sequences, we developed a semi-automated fact checking tool, Seek & Blastn, to verify the targeting or non-targeting status of published nucleotide sequence reagents. From previously described and unknown corpora of 48 and 155 publications, respectively, Seek & Blastn correctly extracted 304/342 (88.9%) and 1066/1522 (70.0%) nucleotide sequences and a predicted targeting/ non-targeting status. Seek & Blastn correctly predicted the targeting/ non-targeting status of 293/304 (96.4%) and 988/1066 (92.7%) of the correctly extracted nucleotide sequences. A total of 38/39 (97.4%) or 31/79 (39.2%) Seek & Blastn predictions of incorrect nucleotide sequence reagent use were correct in the two literature corpora. Combined Seek & Blastn and manual analyses identified a list of 91 misidentified nucleotide sequence reagents, which could be built upon through future studies. In summary, incorrect nucleotide sequence reagents represent an under-recognized source of error within the biomedical literature, and fact checking tools such as Seek & Blastn may help to identify papers and manuscripts affected by these errors.

A Cross-Sectional Survey Study to Assess Prevalence and Attitudes Regarding Research Misconduct among Investigators in the Middle East

Background

Recent studies from Western countries indicate significant levels of questionable research practices, but similar data from low and middle-income countries are limited. Our aims were to assess the prevalence of and attitudes regarding research misconduct among researchers in several universities in the Middle East and to identify factors that might account for our findings.

Methods

We distributed an anonymous questionnaire to a convenience sample of investigators at several universities in Egypt, Lebanon, and Bahrain. Participants were asked to a) self-report their extent of research misconducts, as well as their knowledge of colleagues engaging in similar research misconducts and b) provide their extent of agreement with certain attitudes about research misconduct. We used descriptive, bivariate, and multivariate logistic regression statistics to analyze the data.

Results

Data from 278 participants showed a high prevalence of misconduct, as 59.4% of our respondents self-reported to committing at least one misbehaviors and 74.5% reported having knowledge of any misbehaviors among any of their colleagues. The most common type of self-report misconduct was "circumventing research ethics regulations" (50.5%) followed by "fabrication and falsification" (28.6%). A significant predictor of misconduct included a lack of "prior ethics training".

Conclusion

Scientific misconduct represents a significant issue in several universities in the Middle East. The demonstration that a lack of "prior ethics training" was a significant predictor of misconduct should lead to educational initiatives in research integrity. Further studies are needed to confirm whether our results can be generalized to other universities in the Middle East.

An IR-Based Approach Utilizing Query Expansion for Plagiarism Detection in MEDLINE

The identification of duplicated and plagiarized passages of text has become an increasingly active area of research. In this paper, we investigate methods for plagiarism detection that aim to identify potential sources of plagiarism from MEDLINE, particularly when the original text has been modified through the replacement of words or phrases. A scalable approach based on Information Retrieval is used to perform candidate document selection-the identification of a subset of potential source documents given a suspicious text-from MEDLINE. Query expansion is performed using the ULMS Metathesaurus to deal with situations in which original documents are obfuscated. Various approaches to Word Sense Disambiguation are investigated to deal with cases where there are multiple Concept Unique Identifiers (CUIs) for a given term. Results using the proposed IR-based approach outperform a state-of-the-art baseline based on Kullback-Leibler Distance.

Encouraging Editorial Flexibility in Cases of Textual Reuse

Because many technical descriptions of scientific processes and phenomena are difficult to paraphrase and because an increasing proportion of contributors to the scientific literature are not sufficiently proficient at writing in English, it is proposed that journal editors re-examine their approaches toward instances of textual reuse (similarity). The plagiarism definition by the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI) is more suitable than other definitions for dealing with cases of ostensible plagiarism. Editors are strongly encouraged to examine cases of textual reuse in the context of both, the ORI guidance and the offending authors' proficiency in English. Editors should also reconsider making plagiarism determinations based exclusively on text similarity scores reported by plagiarism detection software.

Ethics: An Indispensable Dimension in the University Rankings

University ranking systems attempt to provide an ordinal gauge to make an expert evaluation of the university's performance for a general audience. University rankings have always had their pros and cons in the higher education community. Some seriously question the usefulness, accuracy, and lack of consensus in ranking systems and therefore multidimensional ranking systems have been proposed to overcome some shortcomings of the earlier systems. Although the present ranking results may rather be rough, they are the only available sources that illustrate the complex university performance in a tangible format. Their relative accuracy has turned the ranking systems into an essential feature of the academic lifecycle within the foreseeable future. The main concern however, is that the present ranking systems totally neglect the ethical issues involved in university performances. Ethics should be a new dimension added into the university ranking systems, as it is an undisputable right of the public and all the parties involved in higher education to have an ethical evaluation of the university's achievements. In this paper, to initiate ethical assessment and rankings, the main factors involved in the university performances are reviewed from an ethical perspective. Finally, a basic benchmarking model for university ethical performance is presented.

Plagiarism Allegations Account for Most Retractions in Major Latin American/Caribbean Databases

This study focuses on retraction notices from two major Latin American/Caribbean indexing databases: SciELO and LILACS. SciELO includes open scientific journals published mostly in Latin America/the Caribbean, from which 10 % are also indexed by Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge Journal of Citation Reports (JCR). LILACS has a similar geographical coverage and includes dissertations and conference/symposia proceedings, but it is limited to publications in the health sciences. A search for retraction notices was performed in these two databases using the keywords "retracted", "retraction" "withdrawal", "withdrawn", "removed" and "redress". Documents were manually checked to identify those that actually referred to retractions, which were then analyzed and categorized according to the reasons alleged in the notices. Dates of publication/retraction and time to retraction were also recorded. Searching procedures were performed between June and December 2014. Thirty-one retraction notices were identified, fifteen of which were in JCR-indexed journals. "Plagiarism" was alleged in six retractions of this group. Among the non-JCR journals, retraction reasons were alleged in fourteen cases, twelve of which were attributed to "plagiarism". The proportion of retracted articles for the SciELO database was approximately 0.005 %. The reasons alleged in retraction notices may be used as signposts to inform discussions in Latin America on plagiarism and research integrity. At the international level, these results suggest that the correction of the literature is becoming global and is not limited to mainstream international publications.

Collective behaviour, uncertainty and environmental change

A central aspect of cultural evolutionary theory concerns how human groups respond to environmental change. Although we are painting with a broad brush, it is fair to say that prior to the twenty-first century, adaptation often happened gradually over multiple human generations, through a combination of individual and social learning, cumulative cultural evolution and demographic shifts. The result was a generally resilient and sustainable population. In the twenty-first century, however, considerable change happens within small portions of a human generation, on a vastly larger range of geographical and population scales and involving a greater degree of horizontal learning. As a way of gauging the complexity of societal response to environmental change in a globalized future, we discuss several theoretical tools for understanding how human groups adapt to uncertainty. We use our analysis to estimate the limits of predictability of future societal change, in the belief that knowing when to hedge bets is better than relying on a false sense of predictability.