The advice
The seventeenth-century British mathematician and polymath Isaac Newton is quoted as saying, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, which has been taken to mean that his scientific achievements came from building on the work of others. But when does ‘building on’ cross the line into ‘stealing from’, and what recourse do scientists have when their ideas are plagiarized by others before they’ve had the chance to publish? Nature’s careers team sought advice from two senior academics about this complex question.
Plagiarism is the act of copying a work — either wholly or in part — and claiming it as your own. Those words or works are protected by copyright, and violations are relatively easy to detect and prosecute.
Ideas plagiarism — appropriating someone else’s idea and claiming it as your own without giving credit or attribution — is a more complicated scenario, particularly in science, in which, as Newton said, one person’s ideas often lay the foundation for another’s.
It does happen, but there isn’t much data about how often, says Lisa Rasmussen, a philosopher and research ethicist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. But Rasmussen — who is also editor-in-chief at Accountability in Research, a journal focused on the ethics of research practices, thinks that such cases are pretty common.
An ‘agony aunt’ for working scientists
The challenge with ideas plagiarism, as opposed to text plagiarism, is that it’s much harder to prove without a recording or witnesses of the original conversation, Rasmussen says.
Understanding the intention of the alleged plagiarizer is also important in deciding whether it is a truly unethical act. Another version of the story could be that “this is someone who was having a collegial exchange of information, they were really excited, it inspired something, they went back and did it, and they just didn’t ever connect that this was maybe somebody else’s idea”, she says. “The ethical assessment of it would be a lot easier if we could establish intention.”
The scenario highlights the perils of plagiarism in science, says Praveen Chaddah, a physicist at the UGC–DAE Consortium for Scientific Research in Indore, India, and author of the 2018 book Ethics in Competitive Research: Do Not Get Scooped, Do Not Get Plagiarized. He argues that scientists, particularly students and young researchers, need to be much more diligent in owning their research and ideas when they put them out into the public arena. “As soon as your work is ready to be submitted anywhere — a conference, a journal — put it up on the Internet,” Chaddah says.
What an academic misconduct accusation taught me about sharing research
For example, a researcher could put a paper on a preprint server once they submit their poster, abstract or paper for consideration. Chaddah strongly recommends this ahead of presenting at a conference or submitting to a journal. He says that he’s aware of numerous cases in which reviewers themselves have plagiarized the ideas in papers or conference abstracts submitted to them for review.
