Archaeologica.org

There's an interesting story up at Nature News about scientific ethics. It seems that while one group of scientists is figuring out details about aetosaurs (ancient crocodiles), another group in New Mexico is repeatedly taking credit for their work and naming the new animals they 'discover'. It also looks like the state government, which has been asked to intervene, is trying to sidestep the issue. 'The New Mexico cultural-affairs department, which oversees the museum, conducted a review of two of the instances last October and concluded that the allegations were groundless. But some experts call that review a whitewash, claiming that it failed to follow accepted practices of US academic institutions faced with claims of misconduct. Now all three cases are before the Ethics Education Committee of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, a professional organization based in Northbrook, Illinois, which is awaiting responses from the New Mexico team before making a ruling.'

Sound familiar?

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080130/ ... 1510a.html

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=tho ... t-articles

A new computerized scan of the biomedical research literature has turned up tens of thousands of articles in which entire passages appear to have been lifted from other papers. Based on the study, researchers estimate that there may be as many as 200,000 duplicates among some 17 million papers in leading research database Medline.

The finding has already led one publication to retract a paper for being too similar to a prior article by another author.

Researchers Mounir Errami and Harold "Skip" Garner of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas used a text-matching algorithm to compare seven million Medline abstracts against matching entries flagged by the database's software as being closely related.

It seems that the same thing is happening in Biomedical research articles. It probably always has, but new studies are being scanned by a compter database now.