Science has an article on a study on the incidence of plagiarism, using over 20 years of data from Cornell University's arXiv archive:
New analyses of the hundreds of thousands of technical manuscripts submitted to arXiv, the repository of digital preprint articles, are offering some intriguing insights into the consequences—and geography—of scientific plagiarism. It appears that copying text from other papers is more common in some nations than others, but the outcome is generally the same for authors who copy extensively: Their papers don’t get cited much
The study is available on arXiv. Science has obtained the data from one of the authors, and used this to produce a geographic breakdown of the data:
Researchers from countries that submit the lion's share of arXiv papers—the United States, Canada, and a small number of industrialized countries in Europe and Asia—tend to plagiarize less often than researchers elsewhere. For example, more than 20% (38 of 186) of authors who submitted papers from Bulgaria were flagged, more than eight times the proportion from New Zealand (five of 207). In Japan, about 6% (269 of 4759) of submitting authors were flagged, compared with over 15% (164 out of 1054) from Iran.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by sudo rm -rf on Friday December 12 2014, @02:57PM
After German Ex-Foreign Minister Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg [wikipedia.org], or K-T as his friends call him, had to resign because of plagiarizing and subsequently denying he did it "deliberately" [wikipedia.org]. it became a popular sport in Germany to "examine and document the extent of plagiarism in German doctoral theses" (VroniPlag [wikipedia.org])
In Germany doctor titles do mean very much in terms of prestige and cred (and salary), so it is quite hurtful and disgraceful to have your title revoked. Guttenberg for example left Germany and moved to the US to work there.
I think that fear of these repercussions is one reason, maybe even the main reason, why german authors perform so well in this study (3.2%)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 12 2014, @05:45PM
That's an awesome name. I'm disappointed that there is nothing (on a quick skim) in the Wiki at least mentioning the length of his name. As an aside, his wife is smoking hot.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Non Sequor on Saturday December 13 2014, @01:10AM
I've been wondering if some researchers are copying blocks of text to compensate for difficulties publishing in a non-native language. It's easy enough to say that the entire paper should be your own work, but if you have an idea of what you need to say but don't quite know how to draft it, copying text that says it is a workaround.
If we're talking about copying text describing a methodology or copying text describing results, but with details replaced based on the new research, why not look for a way to accomodate it?
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.