“Don’t think of it as duplication. Think of it as a single paper in a superposition of two quantum journals.”

Adam Marcus at Retraction Watch reports on a physicist at the University of Toronto who had this unfortunate thing happen to him:

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and first and corresponding author.

The article was largely a duplication of a paper that had already appeared in ACS Nano, 4 (2010) 3374–3380, http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/nn100335g.

The first and the corresponding authors (Kramer and Sargent) would like to apologize for this administrative error on their part . . .

“Administrative error” . . . I love that! Is that what the robber says when he knocks over a liquor store and gets caught? As Marcus points out, the two papers have different titles and a different order of authors, which makes it less plausible that this was an administrative mistake (as could happen, for example, if a secretary was given a list of journals to submit the paper to, and accidentally submitted it to the second journal on the list without realizing it had already been accepted by the first).

Also this amusing bit:

Sargent also happens to be a member of the ACS Nano editorial board — and, presumably, was fully in support of an editorial it published earlier this year on the “dangers of self-plagiarism.”

All I can say is, once they nail me for embezzlement and plagiarism, my critics will have lots of fun pointing to blog posts like this one.

8 thoughts on ““Don’t think of it as duplication. Think of it as a single paper in a superposition of two quantum journals.”

  1. All I can say is, once they nail me for embezzlement and plagiarism…

    There’s an (I believe) H.G. Wells story about an author who keeps writing stories that turn out to have already arrived in the publisher’s offices just before the author’s does. That may also be relevant. I will point out that the standard joke when I was in graduate school was that we were going to get our thesis by plagiarizer Indian and Pakistani statistical journals–the rise of the internet makes that course of action much more risky.

  2. A few years ago I published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. Less than a year later I gave a presentation based on that paper at a conference. The conference organizers required that presenters submit a paper based on their presentation to be published in the (not-peer-reviewed) conference proceedings. I edited down my journal article to about 50% of the original length, changed some of the text so it sounded a little better to me, etc., etc. and submitted that. I stated upfront that it was a derivative of the journal article. The second sentence of the Intro reads, “[This paper] is an abridged and edited version of a paper published in August 2009 [ref to original work].” Was what I did okay? Not okay?

    • Samuelson’s article is useful. What I did wasn’t self-plagarism. Citation of the original article in the derivative work rules that out. I think the question is whether the derivative work qualifies as fair use. Did I overstep by using about half of the original? At the time, I convinced myself it was fair use but, looking at it now, that seems debatable. FWIW, I didn’t ask the publisher of the original article to reuse material. That wasn’t good. That noted, they did grant permission to post a pdf of the full article on my (now former) employer’s website prior to publication of the derivative work, so it wouldn’t appear that they were or are highly concerned about protecting profits from article downloads. (That latter point is an observation not intended as a rationalization.)

      So why did I create the derivative work? It was the price of entry for giving the presentation. I wanted to give the talk. I had zero interest in creating an article (on my own time – employer wouldn’t pay me to do it) for publication in the unreviewed conference proceedings. In creating the derivative work, I did what I felt I needed to do to meet the criterion for entry to the conference but no more than that.

      • Unlike Pam, I’m no expert on this, and her article makes clear that fair use often falls in a murky gray zone.
        My opinion: this seems like an OK reason to re-use material (and as Pam noted, sometimes similar material plausibly needs to be reworked for different audiences), and you obviously ack’d the original well, so no self-plagiarism in my mind.
        Fair use: probably OK, but had you gotten permission, 100% OK.
        [Long ago and far away, Brian Kernighan I did an article for IEEE Computer (by their request), “The UNIX Programming Environment” but of course it carefully had “This paper is adapted from… reproduced by permission….” Generally, people who run smaller-circulation journals seem OK with getting mention in much bigger ones.]

        I am curious about the nature of the conference proceedings, though.
        1) Non-review research papers in peer-reviewed journals are supposed to be non-duplication with substantial new content.

        2) Conference talks can range anywhere from:
        a) Giving a talk/PPT about ideas that might happen.
        b) Giving a talk about work in progress, with no paper.
        c) Giving a talk about research results to date, with a paper on those new results.
        d) Giving a talk that reviews and synthesizes work, with/without a paper. Certainly, lots of invited talks are like that.
        Some conferences just collect the presentations as proceedings, which is unambiguous: they are talks, not papers.

        Of course, the level of peer-review can range anywhere from zero to stringent, with 50%+ rejection rates.

        But the one you describe is in some sense a strange combination, i.e., that they required a paper, but it could be explicitly a cut-down version of a previously-published paper. Maybe this varies by discipline?

        • My talk was 2b/2c. I published the journal article about eight months before the conference but hadn’t presented the work to a general audience before. The conference was a good opportunity to do so. (I’d presented the work to small private audiences but not a larger (50ish person) general audience.) Background info: The agency which sponsored my work decided not to continue supporting it. (They dropped a whole field of related research in late 2008, not just my project.) A significant part of my motivation for giving the talk was that I was hoping to interest potential sponsors.

          The organization which put on the conference sells the proceedings to make money – well, at least that seems to be their goal. (They publish hundreds of proceedings volumes per year.) The conferences themselves can be pretty decent but the proceedings are unreviewed and unedited and, not surprisingly, the quality of the papers is erratic. For comparison, the journal which published the original work is quite reputable. And they gave my employer permission to put the paper up on the company website w/o any fuss, which was nice – although given that my employer coughed up about $2k in page charges that seems an appropriate courtesy on their part. Interestingly enough – or not – I just Googled myself and discovered that you can download my conference presentation from http://www.dtic.mil for free – no need to cough up $18 for the conference proceedings paper unless you absolutely can’t live without the prose. For comparison the journal article is $15 for society members and $35 for non-members if you download from the journal site – or free if you download it from my former employer’s site. (The price charged for individual articles and whether it’s justified is a whole different kettle of fish though.)

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