Thursday, September 6, 2012

Avoidance of plagiarism

As the center of gravity for scientific research is moving from old locales with longstanding traditions to new geographies with forgotten traditions or which never had them, plagiarism has become a major issue. At times it feels like being in the Wild West.

Sometimes papers are pure copies of previous work. More often, authors have not yet developed a proper hygiene for citing related work. I am always surprised how often authors cite secondary references instead of primary references, a fact I tend to take as laziness and punish with a negative review.

In Volume 6, Issue 1 of the SPIE Journal of Nanophotonics, Editor-in-Chief Akhlesh Lakhtakia has written a very useful editorial on this topic. Follow this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/1.JNP.6.069901.

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