Due to the Internet it is easy to “steal” parts or the complete work of others — e.g. essays, theses or other works assigned to students — and re-use them by not labeling it as the work of others (citing). Writing an essay by using the cut & paste technique to copy text blocks from the Internet is easy and quick. Why should a student spend much time on writing an essay that has been already written before? According to a report by the BBC, Student plagiarism is common in the UK and probably becoming more so. In order to limit plagiarism, universities publish guidelines on how to avoid plagiarism. But what exactly is plagiarism? Wikipedia defines plagiarism as

Plagiarism is the practice of claiming or implying original authorship of (or incorporating material from) someone else’s written or creative work, in whole or in part, into one’s own without adequate acknowledgement.

Can there be something as self-plagiarism? Can we steal something from our own work? Yes, in some sense, and it is a problem in academia. I reported recently, that I’m currently involved in the review process for an academic conference. A couple of days ago, one of the reviewers, who worked on a paper that was also assigned to me, claimed to have found a case of self-plagiarism and notified the conference chairs to check this case. Subsequently, the chairs asked the reviewers to check this claim and re-visit their reviews if needed. In the end, the paper has been rejected due to self-plagiarism.

What happened here and why is it bad to steal from oneself? In a first step, I’m going to redefine the term to steal in context of self-plagiarism. It may be adequate when speaking about plagiarism in the sense of stealing a text, but an author cannot steal his own work. I only used this term to highlight the problem of plagiarism in the introduction of this post. According to Roig, “self-plagiarism occurs when authors reuse their own previously written work or data in a ‘new’ written product without letting the reader know that this material has appeared elsewhere” [Roi06]. Thus, self-plagiarism is more about (deceit and fraudulent) concealment than stealing.

But why can it be a problem in academia when authors are reusing previously written work without citing? Well, it is a problem due to novelty of scientific papers. A research paper should present something now, something that was not know before. A new result, a new algorithm, whatever. This makes it interesting and justifies a new publication. Thus, reusing an existing paper means consciously publishing a known fact by claiming to present something new, e.g. in order to increase one’s Google Scholar rating. Academic conferences want to publish and discuss unpublished work and thus self-plagiarism is a problem. (It is alright to publish an extended version or an article based on several conference papers in an academic journal)

And why is it desirable to do self-plagiarism? Well, reusing a previously published paper is much less work than doing originate research and increases the amount of published papers. The amount of published papers is a simple metric that may be used to guess the “competence” of an researcher (as discussed in an previous post). Thus, the more papers published, the better — publish or perish! This fact may entice an author into doing so.

There are bad news. Viruses and worms are subject to a constant evolution and we are far from reaching the steady state. New influenza viruses, an infectious disease caused by RNA viruses, are constantly produced by mutation and reassortment (the mixing of genetic material from two similar viruses). In the olden days of computing, when we gazed at EGA graphics, computer users content against boot sector viruses and other malicious code affecting their programs. These kinds of viruses became less common in later generations where virus developer focused on exploiting the rich scripting functionalities provided by modern office application suites and Macro Viruses were becoming more widespread. Nowadays, one has to cope with security exploits in hosted software (e.g. phpBB), security leaks in web 2.0 applications (e.g. Facebook applications), phising, ….

This are well-known facts. I presented them to illustrate that viruses evolve and infect new hosts. The bad news is that research has been infected by a new virus called scholastica googlensis, as Alois Potton highlights in the 3/2008 issue of the PIK journal. Scholastica googlensis causes a linearisation of humans aiming towards a perfect alignment, making researchers comparable. Reputation is reduced to a single number, the Google Scholar index, expressing the amount of papers written by the considered author which are indexed in Google’s database. Only the number counts, publish or perish! Research is scaled down to a single metric. The higher the index, the higher the reputation, the higher chances are in an appointment board when filling a vacancy for an full professor. Alois Potton mentioned in his column the idea to reduce the review process at Dagstuhl seminars to a single one dimensional number: the Google Scholar index of the author. Life can be pretty simple.

The consequences are that a single company using the page rank algorithm not only controls the available knowledge – a fact is known, if and only if it is presented within the first n search results – but also influences the way knowledge is created by impairing the selection process in research.

Regarding to Einstein, everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Is this metric already a way too simple?