Plagiarism – a Societal Contagious Disease or Just a Means for Opportunists to Reach for a Better Position?

The amount of medical articles retracted by editors is escalating alarmingly. Accessed on May the 3rd 2011, the Pub Med site displayed 644 articles retracted. The dimensions of the phenomenon mirrored by other data source are impressing: ”of the 9 398 715 articles published between 1950 and 2004, 596 were retracted. This wave of retraction impacts highly respected journals.” [1]. And the increase even if limited to the period comprised between 1990 and 2006 is significant with a p = 0.002 [1].
It would be insane to read them all in order to identify the reasons they were sieved, it would be unprofessional since nobody is qualified enough to assess them in a reliable way and obviously it would be impossible to fulfill such an unrealistic task. Nobody would benefit of it.
The editors always make a formal statement as to the reasons of retractions: inquires unveiling the lack of ethics committees’ approval of research, the inability to provide the documents relevant to the research published, unintentional alteration of the data, inappropriate use of statistics, any form of trespassing the ethical conduct of research, to name a few.
Sometimes, plagiarism is committed involuntarily. For instance, a prominent lecturer recently paraphrased a statement omitting to quote the author, failing to acknowledge the paraphrasing, and still pointing out on research fraud. Seated in the audience, somebody next to me showed me a book purchased at the airport bookstore. The book contained an example promoted by the lecturer. I can only imagine that taken by the wave of rhetoric, he forgot to credit the author and involuntarily committed plagiarism while vituperating against it. Is it then so easy to misbehave, or are the definitions of plagiarism too tight? [More]