Giving thanks for plagiarism detection software: Catching up on retractions for the sincerest form of flattery

Today, on Thanksgiving in the U.S., Retraction Watch is taking a bit of a holiday as we dig into some turkey — not to be confused with retractions from Turkey. We’d like to give thanks for the thousands of Retraction Watch readers all over the world who’ve helped us shine a spotlight on the scientific process, warts and all.

And we imagine that journal editors around the globe are giving thanks to plagiarism detection software such as iThenticate, so today’s post is a roundup of some recent retractions for plagiarism:

You’ve been dupe’d: Catching up on authors who liked their work enough to use it again

photo by Mark Turnauckas via Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/marktee/

As we’ve noted before, we generally let duplication retractions make their way to the bottom of our to-do pile, since there’s often less of an interesting story behind them, duplication is hardly the worst of publishing sins, and the notices usually tell the story. (These are often referred to — imprecisely — as “self-plagiarism.”)

But that skews what’s represented here — boy, are there a lot of duplication retractions we haven’t covered! — and we might as well be more comprehensive. Plus, our eagle-eyed readers may find issues that we won’t see on a quick scan.

So with this post, we’re inaugurating a new feature here at Retraction Watch, “You’ve been dupe’d.” Every now and then, we’ll gather five of these duplication retractions at a time, and post them so they get into the mix, and into our category listing (see drop-down menu in right-hand column if you haven’t already). Here are the first five: