iThenticate Blog

From a search engine ranking perspective, social media sites tend to do well because they promote sharing content among users.  Pinterest, the newest craze in social media, doesn’t exactly seem to fit into the same mold. Users are more often than not “pinning” images that are not theirs to post, an act that is viewed by many as plagiarism, and potentially seen by stock photography agencies as copyright infringement.

Hungarian President, Pal Schmitt, has officially resigned due to plagiarism accusations. In Monday's vote by Hungary’s parliament, President Schmitt's resignation was accepted by a margin of 338-5. Hungary's Fidesz party, led by Prime Minister Victor Orban, will initiate negotiations with the country's other parties to find a successor for President Schmitt.

There are various means of measuring a researchers’s level of success in their field of expertise. Tallying the number of published papers is certainly one of them. Counting how many times each of those papers has been cited in credible journals is another. The problem with each of these methods is that, if you look at the cumulative totals of published works or citations, neither is really an accurate depiction of the quality of work being done by one individual or group. It was for that reason that the h-index, a formula that takes both of these factors into account, was developed.

The United States Office of Research Integrity (ORI), in an effort to maintain tighter controls on plagiarism in the scientific community, recently ruled that Gerald Lushington, the director of bioinformatics at Kansas University in Lawrence, was guilty of plagiarism and research misconduct for not reporting a case of plagiarized material he had spotted in a research paper. His associate director, Mahesh Visvanathan, the person who submitted the plagiarized work, was also censured for misconduct.

As with most infractions – intentional plagiarism isn’t often a singular event.  If someone plagiarizes and gets away with it, they are very likely to do it again because no negative reinforcement has emerged to block their actions.  In fact, they are rewarded by their actions because they end up doing less work and getting all the credit for it.

In most industries, problems start at the highest corporate level and trickle downstream to the lower levels of a company. Corporate and legal regulations are purposefully enforced to prevent problems from going upstream – starting with a low level worker and then going on to affect management, executives and investors. These measures are in place so that a company’s organizational hierarchy doesn’t collapse at the drop of a dime.

Research misconduct can cause damage in many ways. Institutions, publishers and patients can all be affected by the misconduct of a single researcher. A recent case that involves a researcher at Duke University could go down in history as one of the biggest medical research frauds ever.

The Journal Register Company recently took on plagiarism at one of its Connecticut publications in a very unique way. After two incidents of plagiarism in a time span of three months, the editor of the Journal Register’s Connecticut papers, Matt DeRienzo, decided to utilize an evaluation technique employed in middle schools across the country: a pop quiz.

You’d think that when you’re buying from a company as prestigious as Amazon that you could avoid plagiarism, but unfortunately, the theft of intellectual property and manuscripts rears its ugly head even in the most legitimate business circles. When buying reading material for your Kindle, you might be getting the real deal from a genuine author, or you could be getting a pirated version that someone else downloaded, copied, and repackaged.