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The Ignoble Art of Cheating in Scientific Publications

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Sathiswaran Selvam
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38 views2 pages

The Ignoble Art of Cheating in Scientific Publications

Uploaded by

Sathiswaran Selvam
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ARTICLE IN PRESS

Water Research 39 (2005) 1–2


www.elsevier.com/locate/watres
Editorial

The ignoble art of cheating in scientific publications

Scientists all over the world must be under tre- partial result. This is also known as ‘salami tactics’. In
mendous pressure to publish more and more papers Water Research we publish papers with significant
in high quality, peer reviewed journals like Water amount of new findings, thus many salami papers get
Research. At least, this is our conclusion when rejected.
we look at the increasing number of submissions that
we receive. Unfortunately, we also find that the
percentage of manuscripts that involve ‘unethical Omit/outvote some of your colleagues as authors
publishing behaviour’ (a.k.a. cheating) is growing. Whether it is forgetfulness, or that certain authors
Some cheating is outright cheating but there are are afraid that ‘the other guy will get all the recognition’;
other cases where the cheating could be seen as this is simply not done. You have to include all authors.
‘laziness’, perhaps ‘ignorance’ or even due to cultural Even international copyright law clearly states that ‘every-
differences. As seen in absolute numbers, the problem body who has contributed to a work has the right to be
is still very small, nevertheless, we would like to address identified as a such’, so there is no excuse for not
it here. complying.
Below we have listed various categories of cheating
and the policy of Water Research.
Include friends or relatives as authors
This can give you new friends but not within our
Old paper—new author community. Water Research is one of the best journals
We have seen, luckily only a few, cases where authors in its field so if your paper is accepted it means that all
have taken an (very) old paper and submitted this under contributors receive high esteem. The fact that your
their own name(s). Due to the ever-increasing size and husband made the figures for your paper doesn’t make
speed of our databases we will catch most of these cases. him a scientist.
These are clear-cut cases of ‘malicious intent’ and in
Water Research we will blacklist the author(s) from
publishing in Water Research. We will also inform
Don’t cite earlier papers
editors of other journals.
It might give a good first impression if there are no
citations of earlier work, and an inexperienced or
incompetent reviewer might think that this ground-
Cut and paste from a different paper breaking paper should have been published in Nature.
This is easier than writing something yourself and if In Water Research papers with insufficient reference to
you lack data you can ‘‘borrow’’ it from another author. earlier work will be rejected.
Once an author told me that he ‘had done it because it
could not be written any better. I am especially fond of
this case as I was the author from whom he had cut! If
In order to emphasize that we are serious about
you want to refer to research previously published, you
these matters we will place the above in condensed
should cite that paper not copy it.
form on the electronic submission site of Water Re-
search (http://www.ees.elsevier.com/wr) and a state-
Multiple papers ment that by submitting your paper to Water Research
Certain scientists try to squeeze as many papers as you adhere to our policy on unethical publishing
possible out of their research, by writing a paper on each behaviour.

0043-1354/$ - see front matter r 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.


doi:10.1016/j.watres.2004.10.002
ARTICLE IN PRESS
2 Editorial / Water Research 39 (2005) 1–2

On behalf of all Editors of Water Research and the Mogens Henze


Publisher. Department of Environmental Science and Engineering,
Technical University of Denmark, Building 115, 2800
Mogens Henze Lyngby, Denmark
Editor-in-chief E-mail address: moh@er.dtu.dk

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