iThenticate Blog

Part 3 - Scholarly Publishing - Adaptating to Change

Part 2 - Scholarly Publishing - Technological Impact

Part 1 - Scholarly Publishing - Economic Impact

Why do people plagiarize? A Huffington post article recently started off by answering this question. Ellen Siminoff writes: “It's that plate of cookies on the counter that you know you should keep away from because you're determined to stick to your diet ... but they're right there.”

Dan Kimber, a former columnist at Glendale News-Press, who was accused and found guilty of plagiarism back in 2003, just published his first blog post on Montrose Patch.

Written by Eric Hoppe, Account Manager, Constant Content. Plagiarism has existed nearly as long as the written word itself, but it has never been easier for plagiarists to cut and paste some else’s words and claim them as their own. That can be a big problem for webmasters in search of quality website content and article writers for their websites, blogs and online stores. Webmasters know that they need to rank high in search engine results in order to compete. They also know that Google and other popular search engines take a dim view of duplicate content. Webmasters who buy articles they believe are original content can be in for an unpleasant, and dangerous, surprise when Google slaps them with a duplicate content penalty and buries their sites at the bottom of the rankings.

Impact factor is a big deal for scientific journals. The impact factor score is based on the average number of citations a journal receives – an approximate measure of how important and relevant a journal is to the scientific community. For a journal (along with its editors and authors) impact factor can determine distribution deals, grant funding, and the overall success of a publication. Although the impact factor score is mathematically calculated for each journal, in the end its foundation is laid by one organization: Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports.

Three Wiley-Blackwell nursing journals, The Journal of Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, the Journal of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners and Perspectives in Psychiatric Care, recently detected cases of plagiarism in published articles written by Professor Scott J.M. Weber, a now former assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing. After investigation, Wiley-Blackwell issued a retraction of seven articles after concluding Weber had liberally borrowed previously published research without attribution.

Science Reporting and journalism have changed quite a bit over the last several decades. In the past, there were only a few central news sources that people got their scientific information from. For example, viewers would tune into the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite to get their daily or weekly update on scientific discovery and innovation.