Editorial pubs.acs.org/OPRD
OPR&D Wants To Get Rid of Its “Nickers”
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the science except for patent reasons, whereas a scientific publication can describe the same piece of work from a scientific viewpoint, with detailed analysis and full description of the science, and detailed experimentation with full characterization of all products and some byproducts. The current estimate of plagiarism in the scientific publication field is about 3%, quite a high figure in my view, and increasing. For OPR&D that would constitute about 10 papers per year, whereas the number we have actually found is much less than that. This may mean that some plagiarized works have been published in the past, but with the current software check, very few should escape our notice in the future. Neverthless, make no mistake. If misconduct in the area of plagiarism occurs, we will detect it, and authors will, in certain circumstances, be punished. We must maintain high standards of ethics in publication and stamp out any misconduct. OPR&D aims to do just that by removing its “nickers”.
irst of all I must explain that the title of this piece does not have a typo with a missing “k”. In slang English and maybe in American too, the word “nick”1 means to steal or to copy, so someone who copies could be described as a “nicker”. Thus, this article is all about “nicking” and has nothing to do with “being in the groove”, but enough of the puns and on to the serious aspects of “nicking”. There has been an increase in the amount of plagiarism in all walks of life over the past decade, and unfortunately, manuscripts submitted to scientific journals are not exempt. Plagiarism means copying a part or the whole of another’s work, so even copying a paragraph from another source constitutes plagiarism if it is not in quotation marks and the original author is not referenced. Self-plagiarism is more common, where the author uses parts of a previously submitted paper or patent, and then copies and pastes sections into a new manuscript. ACS Ethical Guidelines on plagiarism are clear, and authors submitting manuscripts should read these guidelines before submission, to make sure their papers contain no plagiarism. All papers which are accepted for publication are now subject to scrutiny using plagiarism software, which identifies sections of the manuscript using the same series of words which have appeared in the literature in a prior publication. Of course, we all use common phrases, especially in experimental write-ups, where the description of a synthetic procedure will undoubtedly contain many common phrases. The editors will make allowances for this type of duplication of strings of words. If an accepted manuscript contains a high percentage of duplicate phrases or paragraphs, then the editor will decide whether these are sufficient to reject the paper, whether to ask the author to revise the manuscript, or whether to ignore the duplication on the basis that these are common phrases used every day in science. A common area of duplication is in an introduction to a paper, where an introduction to the previous paper in the series is simply transposed into the new publication. The message for authors, however, is clear. It is not acceptable to cut and paste whole chunks of other publications, even if you were the original author of the work. In Organic Process Research & Development (OPR&D), what we often find is that sentences and sometimes paragraphs are clearly extracted from patent applications describing the same piece of work, which industrial authors may have submitted prior to writing the paper. If the sentence contains the word “preferably” I am suspicious, and if it contains the words “more preferably” or “most preferably” I am fairly sure that the wording is from a patent or patent application. However, a patent application requires different language from a scientific manuscript, having an entirely different purpose, and “patentese” should not be used in papers submitted to OPR&D. I should clarify that it is perfectly acceptable, as far as OPR&D is concerned, for authors to patent a piece of work and then to write up the same work for publication. As editor, I regard the patent as a legal document not designed to discuss © 2014 American Chemical Society
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Trevor Laird, Editor AUTHOR INFORMATION
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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REFERENCES
(1) Other meanings of “nick” are “to arrest” and “prison”, so most meanings are associated with wrongdoing.
Published: January 24, 2014 279
dx.doi.org/10.1021/op500013h | Org. Process Res. Dev. 2014, 18, 279−279
