How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022

Credit
Ethics in scientific publishing
Some preliminaries

Good scientists build on each other’s work. They do not, however, take credit for others’ work.

(ScienceCartoonsPlus.com)

If your paper includes information or ideas that are not your own, be sure to cite the source. Likewise, if you use others’ wording, remember to place it in quotation marks (or to indent it, if the quoted material is long) and to cite a reference. Otherwise, you will be guilty of plagiarism, which the U.S. National Institutes of Health defines as “the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit” (National Institutes of Health 2010). To avoid inadvertent plagiarism, be sure to include information about the source when you copy or download materials that others have written. To avoid the temptation to use others’ wording excessively, consider drafting paragraphs without looking directly at the source materials; then look at the materials to check for accuracy.

In journal articles in most fields of science, it is unusual to include quotations from others’ work. Rather, authors paraphrase what others have said. Doing so entails truly presenting the ideas in one’s own way; making minor changes does not constitute paraphrasing. To take an example, imagine that you wish to express the following idea, which appears later in this book:

“Leave your shyness behind when you accompany a poster.” (Gastel and Day, 2022)

The following would not constitute adequate paraphrasing:

Be sure to leave your shyness behind you when you present a poster. (Gastel and Day, 2022)

When you accompany a poster, leave your shyness behind you. (Gastel and Day, 2022)

Examples of sufficient paraphrasing include the following:

Poster presenters should not be shy. (Gastel and Day, 2022)

Gastel and Day (2022) say not to be shy when presenting a poster.

Avoid shyness when presenting a poster. (Gastel and Day, 2022)

If you are presenting a poster, you should not act shy. (Gastel and Day, 2022)

On rare occasions—for example, when an author has expressed a concept extraordinarily well—quoting the author’s own phrasing may be justified. If you are unsure whether to place in quotation marks a series of words from a publication, do so. If the quotation marks are unnecessary, an editor at the journal can easily remove them. If, however, they are missing but should have been included, the editor might not discover that fact (until, perhaps, a reader later does), or the editor might suspect the fact and send you an inquiry that requires a time-consuming search. Be cautious, and thus save yourself from embarrassment or extra work.

Resources to educate oneself about plagiarism, and thus learn better how to avoid it, include a tutorial from Indiana University (Frick et al. 2021), an online guide to ethical writing (Roig 2015), and a variety of materials posted on the websites of university writing centers. Another resource to consider is plagiarism-checking software. Such software helps identify passages of writing that seem suspiciously similar to text elsewhere; one can then see whether it does indeed appear to be plagiarized. Such software, such as Turnitin, is available at many academic institutions. Free plagiarism checkers, of varied quality, also exist (Warner 2021). Many journal publishers screen submissions with similarity-detection software. Consider prescreening your work yourself to detect and remove inadvertent plagiarism.

Occasionally, substantial similarity between text in different papers can be appropriate. For example, if different studies use some of the same standard methods, parts of their methods sections can rightly include similar wording. Likewise, if a group does a research project so extensive or long-lasting that it yields multiple papers, the methods sections of the different papers might well say some of the same things in the same way. Guidance on when and how authors can appropriately reuse sections of their own text (Hall, Moskovitz, and Pemberton 2021) is available through the Text Recycling Research Project (textrecycling.org).

Also be sure to list as an author of your paper everyone who qualifies for authorship. (See Chapter 8 for more in this regard.) Remember as well to include in the acknowledgments those sources of help or other support that should be listed (see Chapter 14).