Do you think there is something inherently wrong with scientific journals' scanning systems or have we stepped in the era of computer-generated plagiarism?
Related readings
http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763
Fake paper generator software:
https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/
SCIgen paper detection website:
http://scigendetection.imag.fr/main.php
Dear Maria.
As an editor I would point the quite big amount of work made by editors or associate editors to screen papers for falsification or other type of misconduct (including fake papers) and later on to maintain good scientific quality of the journal they are working for. Many of us are not paid and do that for the sake of science. But what appears clearly, is that we are often not enough to screen all papers. As a result i can only assume that some journal do not request their editors to screen incoming papers and directly send them for review. This does not solve the problem as many editors will tell you that finding good reviewers becomes harder and harder. I mean competent and dedicated reviewers. In the end keeping high scientific quality of a journal is clearly not an easy task. As a results retractions in scientific literature remain common.
I guess in the case of scigen no conventional plagiarism software would detect it (at least not the one used by the main publishers,...because it it more or less random and not a copy of a pre-existing paper)... Still i am happy that there is at least one software to screen for that. Therefore again we have to rely on humans (editors and reviewers) to maintain the scientific quality.
As an author and a researcher I can only ask myself how we have reach that point (i.e., publish or perish) were we put so much pressure on scientist to publish that they can consider plagiarism or faking paper as an alternative to advance their career. In a very good Nature paper a very interesting statement was that "The modern scientist faces intense competition, and is further burdened by difficult, sometimes unreasonable, regulatory, social, and managerial demands. This mix of pressures creates many possibilities for the compromise of scientific integrity that extend well beyond fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism" (see http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7043/full/435737a.html).
At this stage I would not say that we are in a "computer generated plagiarism" era... but i am not wondering if we should not say that we are living in a "computer assisted plagiarism" era. Still more eyes will be looking at a paper prior to publication , less chances their will be for plagiarism. Of course help of plagiarism detector is useful.
I am not sure I fully answered your question. But I hope this helps.
O.
Dear Olivier,
This was very helpful. I really like the term "computer assisted plagiarism" and I am certain that the research community is looking for systematic ways to deal with it.
And thanks for the paper too. It surely puts industry pressure under the magnifying glass "Does being a researcher require to be superhuman? "
Furthermore, detector systems can also be fooled...as long as an algorithm does the job of a human. Fortunately for us the human brain does not yet have a steroid counterpart of the same caliber.
Stay well. Many thanks,
M
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