Researchers from FIZ Karlsruhe and the Bergische Universität Wuppertal will develop methods for detecting veiled plagiarism in scientific publications over the next three years. For example, publications in mathematics and engineering, natural and technic
Karlsruhe, July 23, 2020 - Plagiarism in doctoral theses by high-ranking politicians - almost everyone knows the topic. But they are far more dramatic when they are practiced in the sciences themselves and, as it were, by their code of honor, by good scientific practice. And: A plagiarism violates intellectual property rights, especially copyright. It is theft of ideas and thoughts. The discovery of scientific plagiarism has become increasingly important everywhere, for institutions in education and research as well as for funding institutions and publishers. Service providers in the field of plagiarism detection are currently concentrating primarily on the identification of hardly veiled forms of plagiarism, which are typical for students and possibly doctoral students.
Against this background, mathematicians at FIZ Karlsruhe and at the University of Wuppertal were successful with their project project to develop methods for recognizing veiled scientific plagiarisms, such as paraphrases, translations or plagiarism of ideas, as they occur especially in the so-called MINT disciplines ( Mathematics, engineering, natural and technical sciences). In order to achieve this goal, FIZ Karlsruhe is researching how potentially suspicious similarities between documents can be recognized by analyzing mathematical expressions as text and language-independent characteristics. This new, consistently mathematical-based approach to plagiarism detection is combined with text and quotation-based approaches from previous research activities.
This should enable the scientific community and plagiarism detection service providers to make even very carefully veiled scientific plagiarism more transparent. And FIZ Karlsruhe and the Bergische Universität Wuppertal are committed to transparency in another way: They will implement their research contributions in the free and open-source plagiarism detection system HyPlag ( www.hyplag.org ) and make their code and research data openly available. In addition, the joint research contributions are continuously evaluated with the editors of the renowned information service zbMATH.
Project manager Dr. Moritz Schubotz from FIZ Karlsruhe explains: “Over the past 10 years, zbMATH's quality assurance system has investigated more than 400 suspected plagiarism cases. Most cases were discovered by editors and reviewers who knew the original results and were therefore suspected. The new research project and, above all, formula-based analyzes should make automatic early detection possible. It cannot be done by the existing text-based software. This significantly expands human expertise ”.
zbMATH is the central platform for this. The information service has documented mathematical publications in detail since 1868 and offers access to more than 3.7 million bibliographical references from worldwide specialist literature. Summarized and evaluated by an international network of more than 7,000 scientists, the scientific quality of the articles becomes publicly transparent.
The information service zbMATH, which was previously subject to a fee, is to be converted into an open access platform and will be freely accessible to the mathematical community worldwide from 2021 . The better detection of plagiarism is given a higher priority.
Further information can be found on the zbMATH product website at www.zbmath.org and on our website www.fiz-karlsruhe.de .
FIZ Karlsruhe - Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure is a GmbH with recognized charitable status and, as one of the largest non-university information infrastructure facilities in Germany, has the public mandate to provide science and research with scientific information and to develop corresponding products and services. For this purpose, FIZ Karlsruhe accesses very large amounts of data from a wide variety of sources, develops and operates innovative information services and e-research-Solutions and carries out own research projects. FIZ Karlsruhe is a member of the Leibniz Association, which brings together more than 95 institutions that conduct research and provide scientific infrastructure. During the development phase of the NFDI, FIZ Karlsruhe, together with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), is the transitional institution of the NFDI directorate.
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