Dear Dr. Murthy,

People are more clever now a days!

In one such suspected paper, I was able to detect the probable one original source paper. Data of some parameters were taken from there. Some are increased, some reduced!

But data of some other parameters of the tables are perhaps taken from some other article. I fail to detect that source paper.

An important question, I follow the answers

The detection of the question in not an easy task. From one point of view, there may be a possibility for such a detection if it is proved that the data of a research article has been copied from another reference source. Possible suspicion proves nothing.

Regards

By checking. But the task is not easy

Through thoroughly examination of the manuscript under review by an expert of the field who has a very good experience in academic writing.

Best regards

Sarmad.

You need to, first of all, have in-depth knowledge of the field being investigated. In addition, the data presented looked too skewed toward a particular direction then it can be said that the data has been manipulated.

Good question... following!

I agree with you Dr Shibabrata Pattanayak.

Regards!

Its not easy to trace but with great diligence and analysis of the works of the researcher, a journal editor/reviewer can detect data manipulation research and/or publications.

How does a journal editor identify that all of the steps identified were actually completed as stated in the methodology of a scientific research paper even with a "non-manipulated set of data"?

The editor, associate editors, and reviewers really can't.

Dennis

Dennis Mazur

It is the most difficult one to answer.

I presume as an editor, or a reviewer we usually just concentrate on evaluating the scientific content of the paper, rather than checking it for the presence of malpractice, and plagiarism.

You cant do anything but just laugh it out when one just mocks himself/herself by doing such acts.

Again ethics is a subject matter

You are responsible for your paper

My solution to it is, don't count publications, while promotions and academic growth.

People just publish to be in the RACE

But in fact scientific publication just purely for the IMPROVE UNDERSTANDING and FACT FINDING

That requires a lot of diligence on the part of the reviewer because it is definitely not so easy.

Follow-up and scrutiny, it's hard work.

Following

Dear Dr. Pattanayak,

One way of detecting fruad is the "Benford´s law test".

If you have a good mass of data, the application of this technique is very revealing...

My best wishes.

Prof. Hess

Dear Dr. Pattanayak,

One way of detecting fraud is the "Benford´s law test."

For whom doesn't know, it´s a statistical technique developed by Mr. Benford, capable of predicting alteration of numbers in a set of data. It´s a good test, exact and has worked in so many cases, showing differences between what it´s shown and what data would be if naturally collected.

You can take a look here: https://www.google.com.br/search?dcr=0&source=hp&ei=kdOnWqe8HIaFwQT66JDQCA&q=benford+law&oq=Benfor&gs_l=psy-ab.3.0.0i203k1l5j0i10i203k1j0i203k1l2j0i10i203k1l2.1764.3000.0.10046.7.6.0.0.0.0.146.715.0j6.6.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..1.6.713.0..0j35i39k1.0.LXY36K9BwF0

Hope it helps.

My best wishes.

Prof. Hess

it is hard to achieve task.

Dear Shibabrata:

In my view, it depends on the specific field of research in the first place: physics? Sociology?

Then, is the author working with primary or secondary data? Primary data are data collected by the authors through experiments, social surveys, psychological interviews, etc. In this case, the reviewer could (and should) require the full original data set and carefully inspect it. Secondary data are those collected by others and the author/s must cite the source, which you can inspect.

If the author/s have subtly change the data collected by them (for example, in experiments or a survey), in order to bias them in favor of their hypotheses / theory, it could be impossible to detect it, even for a reviewer with a deep knowledge of the field. But when others replicate the experiments, the adulteration could eventually come into light.

Dear Dr. Jorge,

My field is Biology. The example cited before was written on an animal trial experiment.

Thanks.

I do agree with the comments of Dr. Ramana and Jorge.

Also in my opinion Publication doesn't gurantee 100% true in all cases. Editors & reviewers can minimize it through different ways according to situation and concern area eg. asking for original data and source, repetetion of experiments, proof by other means, a logical verification etc. Although it depends on the particular editor, reviewer i think that in general it is strictly followed in good impact standard journals to avoid such unfair means.

Hello,

Notably, academic writing is a very difficult undertaking for the nonnative speakers. Robert Louis Stevenson, The American writer, states that in the early stages of writing, writers lack a personal writing style and they should follow the manners of writing practiced by native speakers until they eventually develop one of their own. Alternatively, replication has a legitimate place in scientific research. As a consequence, innocent overlaps in terms of replicating some experiments or utilizing certain key structures employed by famous academics of a given field should not be regarded as violations of ethical issues in research. On this basis, plagiarism detection softwares are sufficient means of identifying likely deviations and imposing extra restrictions would simply exclude a large number of avid researchers whose native language is not English.

Best regards,

R. Biria

It really depends on the subject. I saw some researchers proposing regression models with more parameters than data points! Others published an article in a major journal claiming their model was the best and it was not.