The First Casualty
In the first major casualty of the etBLAST algorithm and Deja Vu database has been found at Harvard Medical School, where Prof. Lee Simon’s review paper has been found to have large sections copied from another professor’s paper.
I had hoped that Deja Vu would consist of articles from random foreign countries and small, obscure universities, but alas, I was perhaps a little naïve. Perhaps the good part about this will be that it encourages authors to be much more reluctant to plagiarize.
On the other hand, it depends on whether the journals care. Elsevier, in this case, did the right thing and acted upon the evidence to retract the paper, but other journals don’t have such “enlightened” policies. I heard once about a professor that was reviewing a manuscript for a journal when he found that the other author had plagiarized sections from one of the professor’s own papers! When the professor notified the journal editor, they informed him that this was commonplace, and that he should just review the article anyway.
What floats to the top in science is often beautiful, but there’s a lot of crap that sinks to the bottom.
