Ethical Issues in Scientific Publishing 10-11
The Case of One for Two The following case illustrates how success may trap a scientist into a difficult situation: Should the scientist violate the rules against duplicate publication or should he or she disappoint good friends and colleagues? By postponing a decision, the scientist makes the dilemma worse. Please review the case in light of the principles about duplicate publication and be prepared to discuss alternatives. Case Study: Dr. Mary Blair is world famous for a surgical technique she developed, which is now in use everywhere. She has been asked many times to write chapters for books on surgical techniques, and each time she has added important modifications to the text (and sometimes to the technique). This year, however, 2 different editors have asked her to describe the technique. She agrees to the 2 requests but finds that her enthusiasm for writing about the procedure has diminished a great deal. Besides, she is now working on another surgical technique she believes will be even more important. Her first paper describing this new procedure has just been published, and she has already been asked to write a book chapter on it. Because of her new interests and limitations on time, she decides to submit the same chapter on the old technique to both publishers. She reasons that after all, she is the only surgeon who can describe the old technique and its pitfalls completely and that she has run out of new ways to describe it. She also knows that the editors of the 2 books, both of them career-long friends, would be very disappointed if she turned them down now, so close to the deadline, after she has already agreed to write the chapters. Questions: Is Mary justified, in this limited circumstance, in making this decision to publish the same article twice? If yes, why? If no, why not? Plagiarism Plagiarism comes from a Greek word that means “kidnapping,” and although there is no child or other person literally being taken, for the author who is plagiarized, it is almost as if his or her child has been kidnapped. The material plagiarized might be a description, an idea, a hypothesis, an observation, data, a graph, an interpretation, or a conclusion. As the U.S. National Academy of Sciences defines it: “In
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