Should a paper be reviewed in entirety, if the introduction contains plagiarized passages?

Question

I'm very new to being a peer reviewer. I agreed to anonymously review a paper for publication, and while reading it for the first time, I was a little annoyed by the writing style. It sort of reminded me of the feeling I get when reading a paper from a student in an undergraduate Liberal Arts Math course. When I began to read it again, I was very uneasy about the writing, especially in the introduction. There were inconsistencies in style. Some short, dry sentences followed by longer passages using flowery language. I looked at the references and noticed a few secondary sources. One was a NY Times article. I looked up the article online and in the first paragraph found a passage that was almost identical to one in the introduction section of the paper I'm supposed to review. I was shocked. And then I found more.

So far, all of the plagiarism that I've found is in the introduction. I haven't read the rest of the paper carefully yet because I'm fairly disgusted.

My question is this: should I even bother writing a review? If this were an undergraduate paper, the student would get an F on the assignment and get reported to the Dean. I want to write to the journal editor and just tell him that the paper doesn't deserve to be reviewed.

Has anyone seen this before, and what did you do? If you decided to review a paper like this, how would you phrase your feedback?

Answer 1

See the Council of Science Editors white paper on publication ethics at:

http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/resource-library/editorial-policies/white-paper-on-publication-ethics/

and the Committee on Publication Ethics flow charts at

http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts

Many journals follow these recommendations or similar ones in handling ethical issues.

As a reviewer, your job is to report this to the editor. The editor should take it from there.

I'm actually somewhat surprised that this paper even made it to the review stage- most publishers now routinely check all submitted papers for obvious plagiarism using tools that check against large databases of published papers and other material. Normally, this would have caught the kind of plagiarism you've described.

Answer 2

I think you've pretty much done your review. You found a whole bunch of plagiarism up front, and that's enough to recommend rejection of the article. Document your findings and report to the editor. Even if the rest of the article turned out to be brilliant and original, there is no way it can be anything other than rejected and possibly even formal proceedings against the authors.

Answer 3

I can't believe that some of the answers and comments here are even discussing the possibility that a paper with plagiarized introduction may still be publishable if only it was otherwise brilliant and original. It's not like we assign 50% of the grade during review for brilliance, 30% for writing style, and 20% for not plagiarizing. It doesn't work that way: if you dope in the long-jump event, you're not getting a 30cm penalty for every jump -- you're kicked out of the event (and, in fact, banned for the next couple of years).

Plagiarism is not an offense that has to be balanced with the rest of the evidence. It leads to immediate rejection of the paper. In fact, I would suggest that the proper path is not even to just suggest to the editor to reject the paper (which is the same penalty as for the regular poor paper) but indeed to use an "exceptional exit path" (too much programming with throw-catch languages :-) in which the paper is rejected simply for plagiarism or unprofessional conduct.

Answer 4

I understand there is a moral and potentially punishable issue. However, as the reviewer appears to have understood, the writer is inexperienced.

What an author knows about plagiarizing practices depends largely on the country/university where s/he grew up in academic terms. In the Anglo-Saxon world I know this practice is severely punished already at undergraduate level, since from early stages of the studentship, students are required to participate more actively to the learning process and write papers for their classes, which allow them to learn about plagiarizing rules. In other countries this is not the case. The approach to the educational process is more passive in this sense, you are never required to write papers: if you do not write, you do not learn about it.

Another reason that might lead inexperienced authors to plagiarize (and write bad papers) is their bad level of English: you do not know how to formulate and write down your thinking in English language, you are more prone to copying text passages instead of rephrasing. I sense that this is the most probable reason for plagiarizing in this case. In fact, you have also noted (to my understanding) that although some sentences are copied, they are referenced to the original source; ergo, the author must have problems rephrasing the original sentences (quoting exists, but it is used for very specific passages, not for banal sentences).

Bear in mind, I am not justifying this practice, I am trying to explain that these behaviors may well exist even in absence of any true malicious intention. Therefore, each case should be very well pondered, before to decide how to act.

I would do the following:

• warn the editor about plagiarizing passages in the paper
• suggest a rejection of the paper
• not recommend formal proceedings
• explain that this behavior does not seem (at least at first sight) to be led by malicious intentions but rather by inexperience/bad English

I guess though that recommendations on formal proceedings are rather a subjective matter. I am sure many people won't agree with my do-gooding approach.

Answer 5

No, it should be rejected on spot as plagiarism should not be supported in any form and any level. If you found the a plagiarised passage is used in the beginning only then it is highly possible that the whole body of manuscript would be full of it and if you would go through and check the whole text then it will be a massive waste of time for you. Moreover if the author did not even know that plagiarism is a sin in science then he should not be in academia on the first place.

Hence my recommendation is rejection on spot as well as to communicate this to the editor as well so that appropriate action could be taken against the authors.

Answer 6

I think it is important here to differentiate between plagiarism and self-plagiarism. It is not an automatic rejection for self-plagiarism in the introduction. If an author has several papers coming out of one study, the introduction usually contains a description of that study that might contain a certain amount of self-plagiarism simply because the author has found a clear way to describe the context. This is generally okay even though it is technically a breach.

In the case you found, the plagiarism cannot possibly be self-plagiarism since the original is a news item etc. Such plagiarism is always a breach and, as others have said, should be reported to the editor and then let the editor decide whether you should complete the review.

Answer 7

Journals have their policies against plagiarism, but it's the editor's duty (or the editorial board's) to enforce them. The reviewer has the duty to read the whole paper and assess its quality.

You should surely report the plagiarism to both the editor and the authors, but first you should complete your duty as reviewer. The editor will then make a decision on the basis of yours and others reviews, and on the journal policy.

If you think that you would not be able to complete the review in an unbiased way because of the introduction, ask the editor to find another reviewer.