Auto-plagiarismo em ciência

This month sees the launch of CrossCheck, an anti-plagiarism system for academic journals created by iParadigms to help publishers verify the originality of submitted work. It will cover 20 million journal articles from major publishers including Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press and Sage.

John Barrie, chief executive of iParadigms and the man who developed the technology behind Turnitin, the plagiarism-detection software, described self-plagiarism as a "huge" problem.

"Academics receive tenure based on their publications - it is publish or perish. That system creates this massive conflict of interest," he said.

"Anybody who has done any research knows it is very difficult to do. You just can't crank out five, ten papers a year unless (...) you have a research team of 20 people."


A pilot study by Tracey Bretag and Saadia Carapiet [ver também] from the University of South Australia found that 60 per cent of authors in a random sample of 269 papers from the Web of Science social science and humanities database had self-plagiarised at least once in the period 2003-06. Self-plagiarism was defined "quite generously" as occurring when 10 per cent or more text from any single previous publication was reused without a citation.

"The truth is that if these authors had self-cited in each case, it is unlikely that the editors would have published their work because they would have seen that it had all been published before," Dr Bretag said.

[Fiquei tão admirado, que mais não faço que copiar e colar pedaços do texto do artigo de Rebbeca Attwood, no THE. Como será a situação no campo das Ciências Exactas e Naturais?]

De quem é a culpa?

Gostei de ver esta perspectiva sobre o plágio. Correndo o risco de ser acusado disso mesmo, mas justificando com base na etérea natureza da informação na internet, aqui fica o naco mais importante:

PLAGIARISM and cheating by today’s cut-and-paste generation of university students will never be stamped out unless lecturers stop spoon-feeding them a diet of handouts and PowerPoint presentations, a leading academic said yesterday.

Baroness Deech, head of the students’ complaints watchdog, said that the way in which education was now “packaged and delivered” just like any other product had dulled students’ sense of inquiry and spirit of adventure. One consequence was that they were more tempted than previous generations to cut and paste work from the internet and pass it off as their own, rather than to explore and find their own answers to questions.

“There is a culture of expectation among today’s students. They just take whatever is put in their hands, be it a handout or a PowerPoint presentation. That way you end up boiling down complex things to three bullet points.

“Students need to be told that their own thoughts about a subject are very important. They need to be challenged to respond in their own way instead of downloading, cutting and pasting,” she said.

“The weighing up of a range of views, the encouraging of non-conformity, the imbuing of intellectual tradition of inquiry are getting lost. If lecturers can imbue students with the view that they are searching rather than copying, then we might go some way towards tackling plagiarism.”

Computer use by students should be curbed to encourage them to seek out learning from a range of sources, she told a conference organised by the plagiarism advisory service JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee), and Universities UK, representing vice-chancellors and principals.

Lady Deech said that hers was not a Luddite approach, and admitted that she was addicted to her computer. But she said that there came a time when students had to log out so that they could look at and listen to the world around them.

Taking down notes in longhand from a book in the library was better than cutting and pasting from the internet, she said, because it required students to “digest” material.