Here’s an interesting article about plagiarism:
The article talks about the fact that two Iranian professors published a word-for-word duplicate of a paper originally written by a prof from Ryerson. It turns out that these two have done the same thing on other occasions. The Iranians’ version of the paper was withdrawn by the journal and they have been banned from submitting papers there for three years. I have to agree with the sentiments expressed in the paper that this punishment is pretty feeble – there are zillions of other journals they can submit plagiarized papers to! If one of our students submits plagiarized work, they automatically get a zero for that work. If they do it again, they could well face expulsion from the university. If one of my colleagues made a habit of submitting plagiarized work, I hope they would lose their job!
One of my colleagues at Memorial had one of his papers plagiarized once: someone took paragraphs from my colleague’s paper and alternated them with paragraphs of his own. The overall result made no sense at all, and was caught by a diligent referee. However a bit of digging showed that the perpetrator had done the same thing previously, and got it published. That journal was notified and printed a retraction. The perpetrator’s university (in India, if I remember correctly) was notified and did nothing.
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