I’ve tried to connect your/SFWA’s attention with Tom Leinster et al on the “n-Category Cafe’” blog, because, though each of these is in a very different domain, and needs to be handled by different protocol, they are psychiatrically similar (in my amateur opinion)Below entirely cut&pasted from the indicated URL.

October 26, 2010

A Short Warning
Posted by Tom Leinster
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2010/10/a_short_warning.html#comments

It’s not very often that one comes across blatant plagiarism, but I just have. I’m not going to give the details, partly because I’m not sure that public naming and shaming is the right thing to do, and partly because I don’t want to be sued. But I do want to say a little, because raising awareness may help to prevent this kind of thing from happening too often.

In outline, then, the story is this. I’m on the editorial board of Theory and Applications of Categories, and I had a paper submitted to me for publication there. I quickly smelt a rat: the standard of English in the covering email and the abstract was fairly poor, whereas the language in much of the paper was rather nice, with some admirably deft turns of phrase. I believe I even recognized the writing style of one of my co-hosts here at the Café.

So I did some googling and discovered that yes, large parts of the text were copied nearly verbatim from other papers. Some of the papers they copied from were cited. At least seven were not. Their biggest source was Higher-dimensional algebra VI: Lie 2-algebras by John Baez and Alissa Crans, which—modulo the replacement of “vector space” by “module”—makes up at least nine of their pages.

This may or may not be an isolated incident. The fact is that plagiarism can be systematic. For example, there was the Turkish plagiarism ring (or rings) uncovered in 2007, involving something like 67 papers and 15 physicists at four Turkish universities. In this case I discovered when googling that some parts of the text had already appeared more than once in the literature, by different authors. One particular sentence was on at least its fourth outing. I didn’t attempt to dig any deeper.

My main reason for writing this is to warn other editors who may receive this paper, or others like it. There’s nothing I particularly want to discuss.

Posted at October 26, 2010 8:29 PM UTC