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220907P - RESEARCH MALPRACTICE: PLAGIARISM

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Presentation at a PICU Fellowship Research Program held at PICU Conference Room Floor 1 Children Hospital, King Fahad Medical City, Riyadh held on 06 September 2022 by Prof. Omar Hasan Kasule Sr. MB ChB (MUK), MPH (Harvard) DrPH (Harvard) Chairman of the Ethics Committee King Fahad Medical City


TYPES OF PLAGIARISM

  • A complete paper by someone else including a paid writer.
  • Copy and paste from someone else’s work
  • Loose paraphrasing
  • Plagiarism of ideas
  • Self-plagiarism
  • Mixing plagiarized with your own words
  • Citing a primary source but information from a secondary source
  • Un-intentional / incidental
  • Publicly available knowledge without citation


WHAT MUST YOU CITE?

  • Cite If you quote one or two words verbatim
  • Cite facts you found in a source
  • Cite If you paraphrase or summarize from a source
  • Cite if you quote previously published work
  • Cite when reproducing diagrams
  • Do not cite if presenting your own ideas for the first time
  • Do not cite when writing common knowledge available in general reference works


PROTOCOL: Originality

  • Thorough literature review to make sure this investigation is original.
  • Check clearing houses such as Cochrane and www.clinicaltrials.org.
  • Cite and acknowledge all information used in the proposal.
  • Why is repeat research already done? Local experience/training/scientific validation.
  • Writing proposals from boilerplates.


PROTOCOL: PLAGIARISM: Definition

  • Create or copy? Is it possible to create from nothing?[1]
  • Plagiarism is a complex phenomenon that may be related to memory lapses and not always deliberate deception[2,3,4].
  • Un-intended plagiarism: ideas gained in discussions or from the classroom?
  • What if it is your original idea but someone already thought of it?
  • Self plagiarism[5]?


PROTOCOL: PLAGIARISM: Definition

  • Plagiarism detection services[6]
  • If in doubt run a plagiarism software.
  • Plagiarism detection can be quick[7] or can be sophisticated[8]. Even Google can help.
  • If you are a research administrator, should you write proposals?


PROTOCOL: Protecting Your Ideas from Plagiarists

  • Discuss your research with colleagues/students OR be secretive.
  • Departmental review/research committees?
  • Carefully document your new ideas and create evidence they are yours.


PROTOCOL: Confidentiality and Privacy

  • Measures for protecting personal data must be described.
  • Access to personal research data: papers and computers must be on a need-to-know basis.
  • Use of anonymized data.


PUBLICATION: International Standards for Authors[9].

  • The research being reported should have been conducted in an ethical and responsible manner and should comply with all relevant legislation.
  • Researchers should present their results clearly, honestly, and without fabrication, falsification, or inappropriate data manipulation.
  • Researchers should strive to describe their methods clearly and unambiguously so that their findings can be confirmed by others.


PUBLICATION: International Standards for Authors, con’t.

  • Researchers should adhere to publication requirements that the submitted work is original, is not plagiarized, and has not been published elsewhere.
  • Authors should take collective responsibility for submitted and published work.
  • The authorship of research publications should accurately reflect individuals’ contributions to the work and its reporting.
  • Funding sources and relevant conflicts of interest should be disclosed.


PUBLICATION BIAS

  • Bias to reporting positive findings
  • Bias to significant results
  • Investigator refusing to submit results for publication
  • The solution is registration of the study
  • Selective reporting


PUBLICATION PROBLEMS (http://publicationethics.org)

  • Author mistakes e.g., unauthorized use of questionnaires
  • Authorship e.g., omitted author, ghost author, gift authorship, data monitors as authors
  • Lack of consent for publication e.g., publication of family pedigree
  • Copyright breaches e.g., unauthorized use of a questionnaire
  • Data manipulation/fabrication/falsification

 

PUBLICATION PROBLEMS, con’t. - 1 (http://publicationethics.org)

  • Dispute over data ownership.
  • Image manipulation.
  • Impact factors: manipulation of IF by quoting one another unnecessarily.
  • Lack of ethical review/approval.
  • Multiple submissions: When a manuscript (or substantial sections from a manuscript) is submitted to a journal when it is already under consideration by another journal.


PUBLICATION PROBLEMS, con’t. - 2 (http://publicationethics.org)

  • Overlapping publications: 2 or more publications based on analysis of the same data set
  • Failure to respect participant confidentiality
  • Lack of participant consent
  • Plagiarism (When somebody presents the work of others (data, words, or theories) as if they were his/her own and without proper acknowledgment)


PUBLICATION PROBLEMS, con’t. - 3 (http://publicationethics.org)

  • Failure of protection of subjects (human) or animal subjects.
  • Redundant publication: publication of the same material or same data in more than one journal without cross-referencing.
  • Selective reporting: When unfavorable or inconvenient end-points (e.g. Outcomes that fail to reach statistical significance or do not favor a particular product or hypothesis) are deliberately omitted from publications reporting research.


PUBLICATION PROBLEMS, con’t. - 4 (http://publicationethics.org)

  • Self-plagiarism
  • Undeclared COI
  • Undeclared financial support for publication
  • Unethical research or treatments


REFERENCES 
  1. López P R[Create or copy... Which is the difference?]. Rev Med Chil. 2009 Jan;137(1):121-6.
  2. Perfect TJ, Defeldre AC, Elliman R, Dehon H. No evidence of age-related increases in unconscious plagiarism during free recall. Memory. 2011 Jul;19(5):514-28.
  3. Kennedy D. Sherlock Holmes and the case of the plagiarised paper. Nurse Educ Today. 2011 Jul;31(5):525-30.
  4. Sugimori E, Kitagami S. Plagiarism as an illusional sense of authorship: the effect of predictability on source attribution of thought. Author information. Acta Psychol (Amst). 2013 May;143(1):35-9.
  5. Andreescu L. Self-plagiarism in academic publishing: the anatomy of a misnomer. SciEng Ethics. 2013 Sep;19(3):775-97.
  6. Garner HR. Combating unethical publications with plagiarism detection services. UrolOncol. 2011 Jan-Feb;29(1):95-9.
  7. Bischoff WR, Abrego PC. Rapid assessment of assignments using plagiarism detection software. Nurse Educ. 2011 Nov-Dec;36(6):236-7.
  8. Chow TW, Rahman MK. Multilayer SOM with tree-structured data for efficient document retrieval and plagiarism detection. IEEE Trans Neural Netw. 2009 Sep;20(9):1385-402.
  9. A position statement developed at the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity, Singapore, July 22-24, 2010.