26 One of my favorite cultural tales is that of the Japanese Matchlock rifle. Back in the olden days, when it was still stylish for people to fight each other with large knives, the gun industry was little more than a glimmer in the eyes of future European entrepreneurs, but that rapidly changed as black powder and advances in metallurgy occurred in Europe. The marriage of a love of intricate projectile machinery as well as long-distance killing yielded one of the most effective weapon the world had seen: the rifle, specifically the operational matchlock rifle. Men were trading in their giant knives for these puppies to test out on the battlefield to great effect. Ahhh… slaughter became so easy (but, sadly, less personal.)
In any regard, our friends the Portuguese introduced the matchlock rifle into Japan in 1543. While the wheellock, snaplock, snaphance, miquelet and flintlock were all being invented and/or discarded as obsolete, the Japanese improved upon the matchlock but never fundamentally changed the design. Always improving but never innovating new.
What brings upon this anecdotal racism? Nature. Specifically this graph:
And even specificlier, this quote from the article:
However, two of these countries, China and Japan, have estimated duplication rates that are roughly twice that expected for the number of publications they contribute to Medline. Perhaps the complexity of translation between different scripts, differences in ethics training and cultural norms contribute to elevated duplication rates in these two countries.
Hmmm… either they suck at translating or they have depraved cultures. Yikes! Not very flattering choices. Strange that the best three nations all speak English. Researcher bias? They are from Texas, which means they probably speak some kind of pigeon English (don’t shoot me, please). But the stereotype regarding Asian creativity nonetheless exists. I’ve overheard prominent researchers quip that, while they have the manpower we’ll always lead in innovation. A comment irritating enough to lead me to vocally correct them in front of others. That being said, I can’t rightly explain it. I’m quite certain, however, tenure decisions based upon quantity of publications, funding levels and, yes, the context of what makes one article ‘different’ from another may be different in different cultures. But I can’t think anyone would call the Japanese ethically flawed. (at least not on this side of the Pacific.)
Look, I duplicated Derek’s shit.
Back to top
Hmmm.. this was at “In the pipeline” yesterday, plagiarism by Kyle, say it’s not so!
It was rather interesting to see the articles from JACS, Inorg. Chem. and JOC that were offenders (Search by joural name).
Yeah, yeah. In fairness, Derek’s writeup is better than mine, but I assume we started writing them at the same time, which was yesterday morning. My schedule now includes the training of two undergraduates as well as my typical chemistry responsibilities, which means the blog suffers (the blog is a distant last in the priority column). I’m also working on writing another paper and have been gathering references for a book chapter. So, I work on articles for a few minutes at a time, save it as a draft, and work on it again when I have time…
If it gets any worse, the blog will shut down. I’d like to think I’m efficient in my work habits, but I can’t put more hours in a day.
Due to Derek’s broken comments, I was unable to respond there explaining that my browsing of their archive suggests that their claims of “plagiarism” are ludicrously exaggerated. I did comment at Writedit and will link to there instead of duplicating them.
Honestly, I’m alarmed at how uncritically their claims have been accepted everyone except, well, me.
Hmmm. Looking at the entries for JACS articles, at least some of them are due to authors publishing a comm and then a full paper on the same topic, both of which have similar abstracts. You’d think the people who did this survey would have checked the length of the articles – if two papers have similar abstracts but vastly different lengths, there’s a good chance that any duplication of data is entirely legitimate.
And many of them are identical abstracts for work that was presented as a paper in one place and a poster in another.
Technically plagiarism, unless the poster came before the paper. Since you relinquish rights, etc, when you publish.
obviously, no moral infraction there.
I think some journals are to blame, too. I refereed a manuscript and pointed out that one plot, which was presented as new data without any reference, was reproduced from the authors’ previous publication in the same journal. Nevertheless, neither the authors nor the editors decided to correct the error.
Fuckers.
The way the algorithm works is by checking for word pattern matches. If two abstracts are in the same field, native english speakers are more likely to orders word permute, use grammatical structures of the more complicated genre, inflate their lexicon with thesauri, and th3ref0re 3vade ma7ching alg0rithms. Nonnative english speakers are probably not going to bother. To a certain extent, this is more honest.
http://web.princeton.edu/sites.....acular.pdf
it is true that the Japanese are very impressive at copying things, but they’re more like the BASF of cultures — they take western things and make them *better*.
Hm. I guess my point is this, if you want to copy your own introductory (i.e. non-experimental) sentence like “BCR-ABL is a target for CML and occurs by spontaneous chromosomal transposition”, say, in two medicinal chemistry papers, then honestly who cares, except for the nitpickiest of nitwits, but you get busted by the algorithm.
However, if you’re doing something like running a study on a metal-catalyzed aldol condensations and you use the same panel of targets to be coupled but only change from magnesium to calcium, that’s sketchy, an inflation of your publishing record, and totally uncatchable by algorithms if you have a strong enough command of the english language.
“Strange that the best three nations all speak English. Researcher bias?”
Along those lines, the only three nations that were under-represented were the only three languages in which English, the current lingua franca, is the native language. Furthermore, countries in which the native language is similar to English (and perhaps countries that learning English is more common? I’m not sure), such as France, Italy and Germany, were less over-represented than countries such as Japan and China, whose native language is totally different from English. I haven’t looked into this further than reading the graph posted here and on In The Pipeline, but if they’re blaming this on Asian culture rather than language, they better have better have some pretty darn good evidence.
Note that of the European countries, Italians fare the worst and it’s well known that the Italians suck bad at English. Then the Germans, then the French. The French practically speak English as it is. And amongst the Asians, the Japanese are the worst at English, followed by the Chinese, with the Koreans being the anglophone superstars of the far east. Where’s India? I bet they’re rockstars, because not only do they speak english out of the womb, but the words they use in everyday language are like, GRE words.
I don’t think anyone doubts that shenanigans go on with small time chemistry journals and foreign authors. I *do* think it has to do with cultural norms and differences in ethics. Someone will undoubtedly prove me wrong, but seems to me that Western culture and its modernish tradition of “intellectual property” is relatively new. What people (including me) call plagiarism, others call “filling in the stupid stuff.” How do you tell that to a graduate student from China?
One of my favorite things to note is the first paragraph from total synthesis papers; how often are they basically the same? Compound X was discovered by author Y in organism Z. It kills X cells at Y IC50. How different many different ways can you say that without sounding like a tool? It doesn’t surprise me when all of a sudden in a foreign students’ paper, incredibly smart verbiage pops up all of a sudden. Why not copy it, they think? It’s great! Why would I change it?
Here’s where I get crazy: how often are papers passed around from school to school? I mean, who are you gonna trust to help you out? Your buddy from undergrad in China who’s at Random Compass Direction Nevada State! Have you found “original research proposals” from other schools on your group’s shared computer? I have.
Then why do Italy France and Germany still have bad ratios. Their cultural norms are way closer to ours. It’s just a matter that English speakers like to perform linguistic gymnastics in English journals. Perhaps it’s our cultural norm that’s incorrect. Have you ever tried to read any of Sammy D’s papers?
“The engagement of the two fields started with the challenge of isolating pure products from complex naturally derived mixtures. As the theory of organic chemistry began to grow and mature, the basis for structure elucidation of SMNPs based on profiling of chemical behavior emerged. The creative interactivity between the proof of structure of SMNPs and the maturing of the general theories of what we now consider organic chemistry is a remarkable instance of intellectual synergism. The massive collection of descriptive chemistry including new reactions exhibited by small-molecule natural products (cf. inter alia camphor, quinine, strychnine, morphine, cholesterol) formed a key part of the database of organic chemistry. In fact, it would be hard to imagine how what we call organic chemistry would have developed without exciting inputs from SMNPs. The growing database of SMNP reactions helped to drive the development of descriptive theory. With the theory came the enablement of pattern analyses by reconciliation of observed chemical properties with expectations based on precedent. This reasoning allowed for the assignment of ever more complex structures. In this way, a whole new world of fascinating molecules insinuated itself into the mindsets of organic chemists. At first, the assignments were unable to deal with the full stereochemical details of the SMNP. As insight regarding the way in which functional groups within a molecule communicate matured, increasing definition at the stereochemical level became possible, but progress was still slow. The process of structure determination, including stereochemistry, was massively accelerated with major advances in spectroscopy and eventually with the advent of pre-emptory crystallography-based elucidations. A remarkable galaxy of pure compounds isolated from plants, bacteria, fungi, marine sources, and in time, humans ensued. This collection proved to be at once mind-teasing and mind-expanding in its power to provoke the imaginations of organic chemists. A sampling of some of these natural products, including compounds of historic interest and some of particularly novel structure, is offered in Scheme 1. In summary, the fields of natural products chemistry and the development of descriptive organic chemistry grew up together in close rapport.”
Jesus christ. (Oh wait, SD doesn’t believe in him)
PS, that was also ONE paragraph.
Deserves the Bulwer-Lytton prize.
Darksyde’s comments forced the origin of the acronym tl;dr
you are clueless.
That might be true, but your comments are hardly as enlightening as they are time-consuming
Now, now, no need to insult. You can just skip the comments you don’t like. I know we all hate being in the lab on Sunday, but there is no need to take it out on each other.
I’m not sure if I’m being trolled here, but maybe you should tell that to SD. I didn’t invent that paragraph.
i.e. you’ve made my point for me.
Well, to be fair, I didn’t read that long comment of yours at all after I saw that it contained something about organic chemistry and natural products. Not that I wouldn’t read stuff like that in a journal, it’s just that the context threw me off. Plus I didn’t care for guessing who Sammy D. was, but now that I think about it, it’s probably Danishefsky. I’m still not going to read that entire comment though.
Sorry, you have to chew things over carefully for me, for I am just a naive nestling. So, um… you have to, eh… regurgitate your thoughts and vomit them out inside my mouth like a parent bird?
God that metaphor didn’t work at all.
SD’s text is overly flowery. It’s like he’s trying too hard to impress you with phrases like “A remarkable galaxy of pure compounds isolated from plants, bacteria, fungi, marine sources, and in time, humans ensued”.
And you didn’t read it? I bet other people didn’t, too.
Back to the main point, who the hell would want to plagiarize logorrhea?
Rico! Hakha! Play nice!
*pouts and sits in the corner*
They ought to compare the text in figure captions. Who has time to read the general text?
Native Africans stand toe-to-toe in 2008 hacking at each other with machetes, by the millions. Godspeed to all sides.
Where are the Blacks, Browns, and Muslims in your graph, you loathsome historic patriarchal Protestant oppressor of Peoples of Colour? How many of your GRE points did you donate to the intellectually needy? It’s a bloody shame.