More Shenanigans by J-Academicians

[Yokohammer]

Whoops ... another top Japanese scientist caught chasing glory up the wrong street.

An article that helped Tohoku University President Akihisa Inoue win the Japan Academy Award has been retracted from a leading U.S. scientific journal after the author violated protocol by reusing his own previously published material without acknowledging it.

The article in the Japan Times: Top scientist in academic row

At first I thought "well, these things can happen unintentionally," but ...

This is not the first time Inoue has been involved in a double publication incident.

[Typhoon]

Whoops ... another top Japanese scientist caught chasing glory up the wrong street.


The article in the Japan Times: Top scientist in academic row

At first I thought "well, these things can happen unintentionally," but ...

Silly J-scientist.

Republishing the same work in slightly modified form is not uncommon.

However, copy and paste is frowned up as being too blatant.

[Screwed-down Hairdo]

Even stupider, all papers from undergraduate level upward are run through software that checks for plaigarism before they are graded, reviewed or published (but that's not necessarily the practice in Japan). Short of putting something out in an entirely different language, you're almost certainly going to be caught if you plaigarize in English.

Always amazes me why dickheads do things like this. Academic writing is simply plaigarizing, but acknowledging who've you've plaigarized. When you get to the highest levels of academia, you pretend to come up with a new idea and then steal everybody else's ideas to use them as support for your pretend idea.

Not long now till you'll have to call me Dr. SDH....

[Iraira]

Always amazes me why dickheads do things like this. Academic writing is simply plaigarizing, but acknowledging who've you've plaigarized. When you get to the highest levels of academia, you pretend to come up with a new idea and then steal everybody else's ideas to use them as support for your pretend idea.

The citation(s) that should accompany any scientific article are to use the prior literature to show the motivation and unanswered questions for your research and in the discussion section as to how your results fit in with the currently accepted published results. Simply slathering together a compendium of works that are not yours, is the foundation of a review article, and generally these articles are generally indicated as such. Inoue just seemed to try to pass his previously published research off as new stuff or tried to hedge his bets and submit the same paper to several journals at the same time. As many journals will send your papers to the same batch of reviewers (experts in the same field), this is pretty damn stupid on Inoue's part. "Hey, didn't I see this before?"

[Russell]

The citation(s) that should accompany any scientific article are to use the prior literature to show the motivation and unanswered questions for your research and in the discussion section as to how your results fit in with the currently accepted published results. Simply slathering together a compendium of works that are not yours, is the foundation of a review article, and generally these articles are generally indicated as such. Inoue just seemed to try to pass his previously published research off as new stuff or tried to hedge his bets and submit the same paper to several journals at the same time. As many journals will send your papers to the same batch of reviewers (experts in the same field), this is pretty damn stupid on Inoue's part. "Hey, didn't I see this before?"

Completely agreed with the above!

Double-submissions to journals are very much frowned upon, but fortunately rare. It frequently happens that authors double-submit to different conferences, but if found out, they are usually banned from the conference (sometimes even for a few years), and the organizers will likely inform the organizers of the other conference, who may also ban the author. Apart from bad ethical standards, double submissions are a waste of the valuable time of reviewers, and they are usually a sign that authors lack self-confidence due to the low standards of their work.

This type of behavior is not limited to J-land: I once had a young author from the UK, who was up in arms when I contacted the organizers of the other conference to which he also submitted. Notwithstanding my warnings that this behavior would not be conductive to his scientific career, he didn't want to get it.

[dimwit]

Self plagiarism is often laziness on the author's part and poor SR on the editor's part. Clearly whoever was doing the in-house review at Tohoku U. was asleep on the job, as any decent editor should have flagged it.

'Is that original or are you missing a reference?' is one of the first questions you ask in doing scientific review.