On what to do if a coauthor is too liberal on the cut and paste (or five steps to take if you suspect plagiarism).
When I was a first-year #PhD student, a fairly famous scholar told me to be attentive to #plagiarism - to be sure to change words slightly - before borrowing an idea.
The scholar felt that inserting a word or two & shuffling words' sequence resolved the ethical issue.
That advice never sat really well with me.
I was recently reminded of that conversation.
My #collaborator found while reviewing our paper's galleys, a few sentences that were "a little too good".
He pulled the cited papers.
My collaborator found sentences that had been directly cut & pasted from a paper (again, which we had cited) but our fourth author had not been given appropriate attribution (e.g., quotation marks & page numbers).
He was panicked. I was panicked.
The fourth co-author added the sentences in question late in the game. We had missed the changes.
After a series of texts & calls, we calmed down.
We wanted the issue resolved swiftly & #ethically.
So what did we do?
We took five steps that let us sleep at night & that we hoped minimized the chance of sanctions.
First, we documented the problem.
We noted where the text came from, noted the page numbers, & highlighted it.
Second, we then ran the paper through a plagiarism checker.
We didn't want to have another omission in the paper. We breathed a sigh of relief when there were no issues.
We saved the "checked" file to share with the editor.
Third, we corrected the galleys & returned them to the journal.
We included a note to the copyeditor. We explained the issue, pointing out that the "borrowed sentence" was not central to our paper, it was descriptive of a method, & begged forgiveness.
Given the paper had not yet been published, the copyeditor was sympathetic & did not think there would be an issue.
We felt better - but - we felt it was worth letting the editor know.
Fourth, we emailed the editor.
We didn't want rumors or a sour taste in our mouths.
We sent the editor our documentation, attached to a short email (a) apologized, (b) explained the omission, (c) documented the plagiarism did not change our work's contribution, and (d) showed that the solution was using quotes & adding a page number.
Given that we owned the error, the editor responded generously. We were asked to be more careful in the future & informed if it had gone through to "print", it would have called for an erratum.
We were much relieved - but there was one more task - what to do about our fourth author?
Fifth, we pointed out the issue to the fourth author who feigned ignorance.
We all knew how it happened. Track changes and version control make it hard not to know.
We dropped it.
Picking a fight over a sloppy mistake wasn't worth it.
By acting quickly and honestly, we addressed the problem, could sleep at night, and resolved never to work with the fourth author again.
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