Serving as a referee for your own paper: A dream come true or…?

Abstract

This note first describes the details of an interesting incident of plagiarism where the author of a previously published paper was sent a verbatim copy of that paper for his review for possible publication in another journal. It then offers a few insights into the possible reasons underlying such blatant plagiarism attempts, and provides caveats against them.

Keywords::

• plagiarism
• academic ethics
• refereeing

JEL Classifications::

• A10
• Z00

Notes

¹ But there obviously is no lack of records of papers plagiarized wholesale from previously published work in the literature. List et al. (2001), for example, mentioned and briefly discussed two papers plagiarized entirely from previous papers to be later submitted to the Quarterly Journal of Economics and Kyklos, respectively.

² One notable exception was Elias Alsabti, Iraqi medical student who came to the USA on a Jordanian government scholarship in 1977 and worked at several medical research centers, until his license to practice medicine was revoked in the late 1980s. According to Broad (1980), Alsabti may have plagiarized as many as 60 medical publications, with at least 5 of them plagiarized wholesale from previously published papers or grant applications.

³ A 2013 paper by Steen, Casadevall, and Fang present ample evidence indicating the sharp rise in the number of retracted papers after the 1990s and explain this in a way that is generally compatible with the discussion in this paper. The authors conclude specifically that “[t]he increase in retracted articles appears to reflect changes in the behavior of both authors and institutions.”

⁴ The results of a recent survey by Necker (2014) provide supporting evidence for this.

⁵ National differences in the incidence of plagiarism in different fields are difficult to measure and the limited number of attempts in the literature usually focus on articles indexed in the PubMed index. A recent paper by Amos (2014) studies retracted biomedical literature and presents plagiarism and duplicate publication data by countries. My calculations based on numbers presented in the paper and total annual citable documents data from SCImago reveal that developing and emerging countries by far lead the ranks in the rate of retractions due to plagiarism.