La vertu d'un LA The virtue of an A - A fortunate hive: Plagiarism: everything but the title

Cannot remember the origin of this picture (pdf)

[Post originated from Grégory Favre news on the excellent EPFL Infodoc mailing list]
The pressure of publication pushes back the frontiers of laziness. Here, a sole change in a paper title allows the paper to pass through reviews (if there are any reviews in this case, look at Nuit Blanche on peer review).

If you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many it's research. (attributed to Wilson Mizner)

The most interesting example i had seen so far was a paper i reviewed on nonsubsampled contourlets (a kind of discretized, directional wavelet). Its content had about 60% overlap with a more standard and authoritative paper on the topic. A big difference resided in the typeset: the text was written with word (instead of LaTeX), the figures were drawn in Word too (instead of Xfig, InkScape). I hereby provide a little excerpt, so you can check the subtle differences:

Original paper: 2) Nonsubsampled Directional Filter Bank (NSDFB): The directional filter bank of Bamberger and Smith [18] is constructed by combining critically-sampled two-channel fan filter banks and resampling operations. The result is a tree-structured filter bank that splits the 2-D frequency plane into directional wedges. A shift-invariant directional expansion is obtained with a nonsubsampled DFB (NSDFB). The NSDFB is constructed by eliminating the downsamplers and upsamplers in the DFB (see also [20]). This is done by switching off the downsamplers/upsamplers in each two-channel filter bank in the DFB tree structure and upsampling the filters accordingly. This results in a tree composed of two-channel NSFBs. Fig. 3 illustrates a four channel decomposition.

Submitted paper: b: Nonsubsampled Directional Filter Bank (NSDFB) The directional filter bank of Bamberger and Smith [14] is constructed by combining critically-sampled two-channel fan filter banks and resampling operations. The result is a tree-structured filter bank that splits the 2-D frequency plane into directional wedges. A shift-invariant directional expansion is obtained with a nonsubsampled DFB (NSDFB). The NSDFB is constructed by eliminating the downsamplers and upsamplers in the DFB. This is done by switching off the downsamplers/upsamplers in each two-channel filter bank in the DFB tree structure and upsampling the filters accordingly. This results in a tree composed of two-channel Nonsubsampled Filter Banks (NSFB). Fig. 3 illustrates a four channel decomposition.

But i am very unfair: the reference list was quite different. Interestingly, to the genuine honesty of the (submitting) authors, the partly copied paper EVEN cited the original paper: A. L. Cunha, J. Zhou, M. N. Do. The nonsubsampled contourlet transform: Theory, design, and applications. IEEE Trans. on Image processing, 2006, 15(10): 3089-3101.

I am not sure this recent "copy-paste-publish" trend deserves as much praise as Jorge Luis Borges short story: Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote. The story narrates 20th century writer Pierre Ménard's efforts to truly re-create Cervantes' Don Quixote, beyond a mere translation, in the 17th century Spanish, sparking thoughts on authorship, imitation and appropriation (well, 60% of my words are similar here to the Wikipedia page ;) There are worse artifacts than copy indeed: "Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it [human kind] and extend it.(Les miroirs et la copulation sont abominables car ils multiplient le nombre des hommes)" (J. L. Borges).

The recent example did some genuine editing: the title is partly new (SOA is mainly expanded), acknowledgments have been deleted, and the references cut to item 21. That's a Catch 22.

Interacting with the SOA-Based Internet of Things: Discovery, Query, Selection, and On-Demand Provisioning of Web Services, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SERVICES COMPUTING, 2010: http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/res/papers/dguinard-intera-2010.pdf
Service Oriented Architecture-Based Internet of Things: Discovery, Query, Selection, and On-Demand Provisioning of Web Services, International Journal of Computer Science and Telecommunications, 2012 http://www.ijcst.org/Volume3/Issue1/p7_3_1.pdf ([EDIT] funnily, the paper does not seem to be accessible anymore since the publication of this post. Still there is a Google Trace, and i have saved it on my drive, in case i'd like to publish a paper on SOA-based Internet of Things in a near future ;)