How to prevent plagiarism from colleagues in academia?

Davide Rizzo
5 min readApr 23, 2021

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“The Plagiarism” by Kurok_Alex is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Academia is a wonderful place where ideas spring and grow. The research activities and the fruitful comments by colleagues can help to improve and strengthen intuitions and early results. The writing and communication activities are the expected step to spread new pieces of evidence or to set the scene for a wider debate.

Each step, from the identification of ideas worth developing, to the design and realization of experiments or surveys, up to the formalization of theories and presentation of evidence follows rigorous procedures.

Nonetheless, each scientific domain — that is: a community that converged on a set of core concepts and methods — has its own internal rules, adapted to the very nature of its own topics. Also, scientists are humans, and as such, they might have parallel agendas and interests.

Altogether, the overall academia guarantees the uptake of rigorous methods allowing replicability and reliability of the knowledge core, even though locally there might be spurious ways of doing it. Sometimes, the academics’ behaviours can degrade beyond critical thresholds. This includes plagiarism and other unethical actions.

Sometimes, the academics’ behaviours can degrade beyond critical thresholds. This includes plagiarism and other unethical actions.

Hereby I’ll focus on the notion of authorship, which is the credit to be given to the people to be mentioned as authors of a given piece of scientific writing. In particular, I want to take here a note to myself on how to prevent plagiarism linked to unethical authorship management from colleagues.

The case could be the exclusion of a colleague from the authors’ list of a new text based on his/her previous work and writings. Even this might appear to be easy to solve, it isn’t when one considers the unbalanced power distribution.

A classical example can be the publication by the principal investigator (and colleagues) of a new paper based on the work, and sometimes even the writings, of a fixed-term researcher after he/she left the lab, obviously when he/she is excluded from the authors’ list.

This post aims to list some useful tips and tools that emerged in a Facebook thread of a researchers association. This is not an essay on plagiarism nor authorship, and even less an exhaustive list nor a guide on how to do it. Take this post as a public note to myself of some links and tools.

In the most classical notary tradition, the best way to preserve and prove the ownership of something is to create a time-proof deposit. In the case of ideas, this is somewhat tricky. Nonetheless, when someone wants to be able to claim the authorship on a piece of scientific literature there are two major ways: integrating it in the scientific literature corpus or depositing it on permanent repositories.

Publishing in the scientific peer-reviewed literature

The first and most important is to publish it passing across the check of the peer review. This creates a permanent copy of the document and the associated metadata, which include at least the title and the authors, and most frequently also an abstract, some keywords and other specific fields. Here comes the first obstacle: correctly acknowledging the authors.

Authorship: recommendations and best practices

The definition of authorship might be largely debated according to the various scientific domains and periods. Nonetheless, writing is an ongoing activity and researcher and editors need guidelines. For that several neutral organization shared some recommendations based on best practices observed in the field. No wonder that the major initiatives came from the medical sector, which is responsible for an intensive production of scientific literature.

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors ( ICMJE http://www.icmje.org/) proposes the definitions and roles of authors and contributors HERE. The Committee on Publication Ethics ( COPE https://publicationethics.org/) more directly refers to authorship and contributorship HERE. So, we can highlight a major distinction between the notion of author and that of contributor.

Aside from that, even the authors can (should) be distinguished for the concrete involvement in the formalization of the idea and the overall research activity presented in a piece of scientific literature.

Contributorship: how-to guidelines

The contributor roles taxonomy (CRediT) by CASRAI might help at identifying and describing precisely who did what. By the way, the website provides also other useful resources and open glossaries.

Guidelines on how to credit contributions to a piece of scientific literature

Deposit a copy on permanent repositories

For various reasons, the classic scientific publication cannot be achieved. For instance, an official publication generally requires to present complete results (I’ll debate this in another post one day) or might be constrained by specific project agreements.

This specifically affects fixed-term researchers, i.e., in their early career, such as PhD student or postdoctoral researchers, whose contracts can end before that the manuscripts are publishable. As so, their production can take the form of internal or project reports or communication on the project website. These formalizations can be manipulated or masked.

The deposit on permanent repositories might help to prevent issues of plagiarism from colleagues, who can publish new pieces of scientific literature based on the work of fixed-term or previous colleagues without including them in the authors’ list.

Scientific repositories

This is where the various arXiv and other archives come in. Indeed, and naively, I never thought to this somewhat clear evidence: the self-archiving is not only useful for the open science, or to preserve ideas against scooping from competing labs. It is also useful to protect against unethical behaviours of some colleagues.

The Open Access Directory ( OAD) provides a handful list of disciplinary repositories beyond the well-known arXiv and its disciplinary derivates http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Disciplinary_repositories

Other generic scientific permanent repositories include

Web archive

In case of proof to be produced from a webpage, the most reliable tool is the https://archive.org/

The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.

The Internet Archive

Dating back to 1996 they started creating a permanent archive of internet specifically hosted on the WayBack Machine https://archive.org/web/ I discovered this wandering across the links of some Wikipedia pages.

The idea is to create a permanent Html copy (a sort of live screenshot) of a web page. Multiple copies of the same page can be created to observe changes in content and style. This is particularly relevant when a time-proof copy of a web page is the goal.

To learn more

This partial list of tools ends here. Though, I still need to add a reference on this topic to my “want to read” list.

Science with no cap (free translation of the Italian title “Scienza senza maiuscola”) is an essay from two scientific journalists about the imperfections of science. The aim is to educate citizens on the ethics of research https://www.scienzasenzamaiuscola.it/

Originally published at http://agronoter.wordpress.com on April 23, 2021.

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Davide Rizzo
Davide Rizzo

Written by Davide Rizzo

Agronomist doing research & teaching in (geographic) data management to understand agtech opportunities for farmers https://twitter.com/dav_rizzo

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