Plaigiarise an American? The French would never do that!

May 21, 2008 at 11:07 am | | literature, science community, scientific integrity

I was recently doing a bit of reading and happened to have two papers on the same subject, short pulse amplification, on my desk at the same time. As I was reading the more recent paper I kept having the feeling that I had just read something very similar. Upon comparison I found that almost the entirety of the more recent paper was plaigiarised from the earlier paper. The French authors even stole a figure from the earlier paper, all without referencing. Ironically the figure that they stole happened to be figure 6 in the original and in their paper, so the text that I copied from the two manuscripts even has the same figure numbers in it! Check out the papers yourself to see just how low people can go in science.

This is excerpted from the 1998 paper by Backus et al.

materials due to the Pockels cells and polarizers can add high-order dispersion to an amplifier system, making it more difficult to recompress very short pulses. Nevertheless, regenerative amplifiers have also been used to generate pulses of 30 fs and shorter durations.102–104

A multipass preamplifier configuration differs from the regenerative amplifier in that, as its name suggests, the beam passes through the gain medium multiple times without the use of a cavity, as shown in Fig. 6(b). The particular geometry

This is excerpted from the 2001 paper by Cheriaux and Chambaret

materials due to the Pockels cells and polarizers can add high-order dispersion to an amplifier system, making the recompression more difficult for very short pulses. Nevertheless, regenerative amplifiers have also been used to
generate pulses of 30 fs and shorter duration [36, 37].

A multipass preamplifier configuration (figure 6(b)) differs from the regenerative amplifier in that, as its name suggests, the beam passes through the gain medium multiple times without the use of a cavity. The particular geometry

[UPDATE: I wanted to put in the copied figures. See my addition to David’s post below.

From the first paper:

From the later paper:

And there you have it. -Sam]

The Assault on David Baltimore

April 13, 2008 at 7:53 am | | science and the public, science community, scientific integrity

All NIH fellows have to take a course on Ethical Scientific Conduct, so I’ve become quite familiar with all the rights of lab rats. Never mind that down in the subway, just a few floors below the 24hr rat veterinary facility, they’re throwing rodenticide out like candy wrappers.

Amidst the jetsam of the course’s various “case studies” we sometimes get an interesting nugget; the David Baltimore affair was one of them.  Its a very interesting case because of the grayness of the accusations and the high level of the involved parties (Baltimore is a Nobel laureate and was president of Rockefeller at the time). Eventually, Congress and the Secret Service got involved!

If anyone is interested, checkout a New Yorker article about the case (abstract only). I’ve just ordered a book (ISBN: 0393041034) by the author of the New Yorker piece. Another excellent overview can be found in this Ethics & Behavior article.

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