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]

19 Comments »

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  1. Coincidence, I’m sure.

    Comment by Chemgeek — May 21, 2008 #

  2. yikes. good eye for catching that!

    would papers this old get retracted because of this? they’re both reviews- how does that change things?

    Comment by joel — May 21, 2008 #

  3. Crazy kids and their conspiracy theories.

    “making the recompression more difficult for very short pulses”
    “making it more difficult to recompress very short pulses”

    These are very different sentences of course!

    Comment by Will — May 21, 2008 #

  4. good eye, david. that’s pretty disgusting.

    Comment by sam — May 21, 2008 #

  5. Despicable!

    Comment by psi*psi — May 21, 2008 #

  6. holy shit, figure 6 is copied exactly. like right-click copy, CTRL-P copied. that’s really bad.

    Comment by sam — May 21, 2008 #

  7. i think you should contact the authors of the first paper, or the editors of RSI.

    Comment by sam — May 21, 2008 #

  8. the second paper has formated their paper such that the figure is also 6(b). comedy gold.

    Comment by sacrebleu — May 22, 2008 #

  9. At least they bothered to change the citation numbers.

    Comment by Axicon — May 22, 2008 #

  10. Unbelievable. What are they thinking?

    Comment by Taitauwai — May 22, 2008 #

  11. UNIX thinks they are different enough lol……

    Same program used by the editor?

    $diff fun1 fun2
    1c1,2
    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].
    3c4
    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

    Comment by Luis D. Alcaraz — May 29, 2008 #

  12. You absolutely should contact the editors of the two journals. This is really, really bad. We both know that this would get you thrown out of Stanford, to say the least.

    Comment by Doug Natelson — June 4, 2008 #

  13. Ugh. Do we now need to treat paper authors like undergraduates and check their submissions against Turnitin.com?

    Comment by Bob — June 6, 2008 #

  14. Impressive. I am not sure the nationality of the authors is relevant, though.

    Comment by estraven — June 8, 2008 #

  15. This kind of plagiarism is (unfortunately) quite frequent, at least for introductory-type sentences. What do you think of this one?

    “The discovery of superconductivity in H2O-intercalated Na0.33Co2 has reopened investigations of the physical properties of NaxCoO2 compounds, which remained largely unexplored so far. In the simplest picture, the Co planes contain x nonmagnetic (S=0) Co3+ ions and 1-x (S=1/2) spins (Co4+ low-spin state). One of the surprises in the emerging phase diagram is thus the presence of magnetic order at rather low Co4+ concentrations x>0.75. The origin of this order and how it evolves with x are presently unknown or controversial. These questions are directly related to the electronic state of Co and to the microscopic organization within CoO2 layers.”
    Phys. Rev. Lett. October 2005 (http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v95/e186405)

    “Although appreciable experimental and theoretical effort has been devoted in studying the superconductivity in H2O intercalated NaxCoO2 compound, the physical properties of NaxCoO2 remained, so far, largely unexplored. In the simplest picture Co-planes contain x non-magnetic S=0 Co3+ ions and 1−x S=1/2 spins Co4+ low spin state. What’s amazing in the NaxCoO2 phase diagram is the presence of magnetic order at rather low Co4+ concentrations x>0.75. The origin of this order and how it evolves with x are presently unknown or controversial. These questions are directly related to the electronic state of Co and to the microscopic organization within CoO2 layers.
    Solid State Communications, March 2006 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssc.2006.01.024)

    Comment by Bill — June 20, 2008 #

  16. Look here guys….

    http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/-alert=13763/0957-0233/19/12/129801

    Comment by Roberto — November 11, 2008 #

  17. whoa

    Comment by sam — November 11, 2008 #

  18. […] while back, David posted two paragraphs from two different papers with different authors; they were nearly identical. Since then, someone […]

    Pingback by Everyday Scientist » someone told the editors — November 11, 2008 #

  19. Nice catch. Kinda funny if you ask me!

    Comment by Sterling Backus — September 7, 2010 #

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