Novelty can be shown in many ways e.g., through a new approach, or better tools. Plagiarists add nothing new, and present it as if it were new.

1.) If enough readers comply about it, the publisher may consider to instruct the editors to reject these papers without review.

2.) It is up to the decision-makers, but a grant or a tenure or a work commitee can set up guidelines no to count highly overlapping papers as separate publications

That will be a good step . But as we know a number of Journals charges publication charges from the authors, now are they serious about publishing original research papers or just making money and publishing overlapping papers.

"A lot of Journals now a days publishes papers which are published earlier either Exactly". Perhaps these should be cited here or on a blog that monitors this activity. Much in the way of 'retractionwatch.wordpress.com/'. Then the editors of the journals can be queried as to why this paper was published a second time.

A good amount of open-access journals are clearly a money-making business, where the criteria for publication is not scientific quality put financial compensation. I suggest not to publish papers in these journals at all. It is unwise to send them original papers anyway because after they publish it, it will have no chance to appear in a decent journal as it will be counted as "non-original", i.e. previously published.

But not all OA journals using the author pay-model are scam, and it can not be said that, generaly speaking, publishing overlaping papers are unethical. As long as the overlapping content stands below 20-30%, it can be counted as a new result (some journals and conferences even allow 50% content overlap, but IMHO this is way too much). Also, i understand that some researchers has the intention of optimalizing the overal value of their publications, so they think it is legitimate to republish old materials in new scenes of higher academic quality. F.e. they continously send enhanched/revised/rewerbed full-text conference proceedings to peer-reviewed journals, hoping they will eventually get accepted, OC, the overlaping content of these papers are well above 50%, but considering the differences between the scenes of publication, i do not think that this is an unethical practice. All they need is to acknowledge their previous publication.

Janos where do these figures of 20-30% and 50% overlap come from? Do you have citations for these figures? Or are you saying that this is an acceptably agreed upon amount?

Yeh I would also like to know the source of the figures Janos. But again as you said acknowledging the previous papers is acceptable but I don't think that makes a research a Fresh one. Most of the research works are based on Some other documented records and those should always be acknowledged. But overdoing the same thing..... I don't agree to that.

Marina, a consensual definiton for duplicate publication is "publication of a paper that overlaps substantially with one already published in print or electronic media" http://www.icmje.org/urm_full.pdf . The interpreations of "substantially" may differ, but they will be always lower than 50% (obviously). A study from the recent past, f.e., reported these results concerning the justification of overlaping papers:

http://jme.bmj.com/content/29/2/109/T3.expansion.html

However in other countries where English is not the main native tongue, the threshold for duplicate publications in cases of english and non-english language articles is higher:

"Substantial overlap was a priori defined as greater than 30% similarity in the content of the introduction, methods, results, or discussion sections. Minor overlap was a priori defined as less than 30% similarity in any of the content of these single sections." http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022149

So the 20-30% that i mentioned before is an approximation of mine, not a consensus. The maximal acceptable content overlap (50%), however, seems to me as a consensually objective value.

Thanks Janos

Yes thank you for expanding on this and thank you for the links.

An excellent source of information on ethical issues in science publishing is the "Committee on Publication Ethics" ( http://publicationethics.org/ ). They provide extensive guidelines, exiting case stories* and more.

Especially, they have freely downloadable flowcharts that explain how journal editors should handle cases of redundant (i.e. duplicate) publications or other cases of misconduct.

* my favorite is the guy who created dummy email addresses for his suggested reviewers!

Cut-shake-and-paste is plagiarism. Avoid this by carefully referencing, including careful self-citations where called for.

When seen, it is everyone's duty to blow the whistle to cry "foul": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower

A very recent analysis of rectracted articles is also informative (see Fang, Steen & Casadevall in PNAS: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/27/1212247109.full.pdf+html ).

One of their results is that retractions due to misconduct fall into 2 categories (by-and-large):

1) cases of fraud or suspected fraud, published in high impact journals and stemming mainly from countries with long research traditions

2) plagiarism and duplicate publications, published mainly in lower impact journals and stemming mainly from countries with shorter research traditions

I do not agree with the "novelty" thing. Every scholar should get a chance to make his/her point. A scholar is likely to approach the same issue from another perspective or question an earlier study which are legitimate; this is not the same as plagiarism.

Novelty can be shown in many ways e.g., through a new approach, or better tools. Plagiarists add nothing new, and present it as if it were new.

I agree with Ian

I think there is nothing wrong with repeating ideas and principles that you have developed as long as it is extending them with new data analysis and that you cite yourself.

Proper evaluation should be the answer. An institution should not evaluate a scientist without the evaluator reading carefully the papers, checking for plagiarism and assessing the novelty. Many papers published in top journals do not show new results, but use fashionable technologies. In addition, checking what has been published later in the field would allow to evaluate if a paper stands the test of time. Unfortunately, most people in charge of evaluation in France are there only for power and do not want to spend time on what should be their duty.

Thank you Ewa. Actually, I think that plagiarism is not a problem anymore as it can be detected easily and institutions do not accept it. "False "discoveries is a bigger problem, because it tends to minimize the role of the discoverer, and journals and institutions do not deal correctly with it.

In my country too we see journals going for no. of papers and not quality of papers. For academicians, papers published is connected with their hike irrespective of the facilities provided. Isn't it funny. The Generation Next is taking this as an accepted policy, which in turn is deteriorating the quality of research works.

Firstly, it is the responsibility of the authors not to do so. They

should be very truthful in this aspect. After all it is very shameful

to them if others find out the same. Secondly, it is the responsible

of reviewers and editors. They have to devote good amount of time in

carefully going through the literature to find out whether there are

any similar (or same) works published earlier or not. If they find any similar

works, they should be very strict in rejecting the paper. These are

some possibilities to work on. Also, if we find that one author had

published same work at multiple journals, we should immediately bring

the matter to the respective editors and hopefully they can take some

disciplinary action on authors. I believe if we continue to do this we

can reduce/eliminate the problem of multiple publications from the

same work.

Good thought Nalam , but edit\or's don't like to go through the papers even. Just pick any online journal and select any paper, I don't think you would be that unlucky to not to find a mistake, that proper editorial system would not have overseen.

@Saumendu Deb Roy, I agree to what you have said. As I said in my post, they also need to take responsibility on this aspect and should reform the way that they are working currently.

I agree with Fariborz.

@ Fariborz Ghaffarpasand I agree with you but again while talking of high impact factor journals arises the question of Selection Bias.....

I agree with Clarinda. Novelty should not be the only criteria. In some sciences this may be a very appropriate criterion, in medicine it is only one of many. Highest level of evidence is usually met-analysis or systematic review. Hence there is a clear need for results to be replicated (especially cinlical trials). Furthermore novelty is not black or white really. If you study the mortality of a disease this might differ from country to country (health care systems differ) and can change over time (new treatments). So it should be studied repeatedly. This is however not that novel, but still extremely important.

I agree with you two but do you agree to the Copy paste technique? If verifying the previous published works, the results can't repeat. But you have two papers with nearly same results. That's what should be stopped. Verifying, citing the reference ... that's fine, but same results.... 'm not sure.

Copy and paste of results is clearly unacceptable. If a study uses the same methodlogy on a different sample I would at least expect some minor variations in data. "True" copy and paste of results would fall under "data fabrication", which is highly deplorable.

However, if another set of authors repeat a study/ do a very similar study on different samples/subjects, then this is a scientifically valid and potentially important undertaking. If results are similar but not exactly the same, this is perfectly fine.

If a report is based on just previous works or researches. And if the student copy and pasted the material from them, would it be considered a plagiarism. Note, that this is not a thesis report neither a project report just a report from previously done works. Please share your thoughts.

@Afzal. Yes, unless the student referenced each and every reference meticulously, and added in some higher thoughts on how all the quotes fitted together.

While novelty is important, it is not the main criterion for good research. Since the metrics outcome of your experiments is good, your findings should be valuable.

To increase the degree of novelty in an academic paper, I believe that one needs to develop a skill of contributing to one's research area. The skill of contribution requires to produce an added value to the topic or the research area. Thus, contribution means added value in terms of novelty. Accordingly, an academic paper can be regarded as having the quality of novelty as long as it is improved by new ideas that are justifiable by some references but primarily one's own arguments. The focus of an academic paper should be developing the skill of contribution in the aim of providing an added value -the purpose of creativeness, the attempt to develop innovative and debetable arguments. In this sense, I believe that novelty can be achieved in academic writing as long as an academic paper provides more than to be only a "library work". Novelty means to go beyond revising and repeating the conventional ideas and not merely relying on the acceptability of ideas, rather to be challenging. In a creative writing the degree of tolerable ideas may decrease in favor of producing novelty -that also explains why assertiveness and bravity is important for novelty and they should be encouraged by the experts in peer review and in the selection commitees for publication.

Try to conduct systematic literature review with the latest investigation and find the gaps or remain issue.