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I am not a graduate student and have never tried to get anything published so I don't know if everything I talk about below here is normal or not.
So I just found out that I have a publication floating around. It's from a paper I worked on for an undergrad class in my last year of University, we gave our Professor permission to use the paper in future work or for publication. At first I thought, "cool a publication," but then I started to notice some strange things about the published paper.
There are 2 authors on the paper that I have never met or heard of, they definitely did not help with the original paper we wrote. One is listed as first author, the other is listed as the last author. The listed first author presented the paper at a conference "International Conference on Information Integration and web-based Applications and Services" in 2008.
Fine I thought, they must have taken our initial work and done something with it; could be interesting.
The original paper was written in 2007 and since it was just work for a class and not a thesis I didn't remember too much detail about what we wrote. After reading the abstract and the introduction though it felt a little familiar.
I went and dug up the original paper and the abstract and introduction were copied verbatim on the "new" paper. I looked deeper and found that nearly the entire paper was copied verbatim.
Some findings
+ Show Spoiler +
It's pretty much word for word to our original with maybe 3 or 4 sentence changes, and some paragraphs cut out and some figures cut out. It's also reordered a little bit. It also includes the grammar/spelling errors in our original. This includes the 'Discussion' section and the 'Conclusion' section.
There are 2 original looking sections to the paper (inserted into the middle), but they don't add anything besides a general description of some terminology/concepts. These parts are never referenced anywhere else through the paper because the rest of the paper is exactly the same as our original. No new figures/charts were added.
The reference list has just had a few things added onto it but they are only used in one place. A very general lead-in sentence in the introduction of some of the concepts.
Data warehousing processes are used to design and develop data
repositories for efficient enterprise reporting and decision support
systems; data warehouse design and development already
attracted the attention of several researchers, e.g., [3, 6, 10, 11,
12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22].
Our original references go up to 13. The new references go up to 22, but the only place they have them in the paper is this one piece. And they didn't even use [17] anywhere in the paper at all.
They did a 'find/replace' on the word "project". Since we did the paper for our class we called our work a "project". The new paper replaced all "project" with "study".
Is this use of a paper normal? Are these 2 "authors" added on a bunch of hacks? I really don't know what's acceptable usage for things like these.
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What can I say? That's bullshit and people are lazy as fuck. There are a lot of professors and academics who cheat like this. My dad was dean of the engineering school at the university in my city and he found a ton of professors doing shit like this. He's now provost at another school and the professors there do that shit as well.
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You gave him permission so you really can't do anything 
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it's acceptable in the sense that since your work was not published before theirs, any claim to academic dishonesty/plagiarism would just be hearsay. it's not acceptable from any sort of moral/ethical ground, but this is disturbingly common, especially at more prestigious universities. i won't get into details, but i had something similar happen to me and realized i had no recourse since the benefit of the doubt will always be given to the professor.
it sucks, and it's the worst thing i think a professor can do. students have very limited intellectual property rights to begin with, and to lift work verbatim is detestable. you can look into getting a cc license on your more significant work if you like, but this usage seems non-normal and the additional authors are hacks.
:/
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On September 19 2009 17:06 FragKrag wrote:You gave him permission so you really can't do anything
I don't mind the Professor or TA putting their name on the authorship since they were the ones we gave permission to and they actually had something to do with the work. It's these 2 other names just tacked on that annoys me. They get credit and first authorship for basically an hours work which seems like a kick in the balls.
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These kinds of things suck. I don't want to believe that there's nothing you can do. You should ask someone with real knowledge on the subject about this.
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Find someone with authority and ask them whether this is legitimate. This query easily transitions into punishing these plagiarizing asses. (Why wouldn't they contact you if they were using your work? Why would they pretend the primary authors were people who didn't do the work or write the paper?)
you can look into getting a cc license on your more significant work if you like, but this usage seems non-normal and the additional authors are hacks.
You automatically hold the copyright on anything you write. That they are copying it is probably illegal. (Not sure which rights you signed away, though.) Proving that may be difficult, since I doubt you have a legally time-stamped copy.
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intrigue
Washington, D.C9935 Posts
contact the professor you gave permission to. perhaps even the dean of the school? plagiarism is pretty much one of the most serious fouls in the academic world - though you're just a newbie undergrad there should be someone you can at least vent to and have a sympathetic ear.
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On September 19 2009 17:06 FragKrag wrote:You gave him permission so you really can't do anything
I doubt it works like that, you still need to quote the original authors or it's plagiarism.
@OP: Contact the professor and ask him to explain.
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Yes, go contact the professor and be like "yo wtf have you done with my work?"
or something like that. ^^;
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On September 19 2009 17:06 FragKrag wrote:You gave him permission so you really can't do anything
It's still plagerism. Go to the dean.
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Yep, this is plagiarism. Unless you signed away your soul, they can't do this. Gogo discreditation!
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Well my name is still listed as an author (4th author), so perhaps that makes a difference? It still seems shady though, since it looks like they did no work besides a couple small general sections injected in the middle of the paper, which by the way they used 0 references for those 2 entire sections.
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This is commonplace, I know a lot of people who shy away from doing research because of shady university politics.
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Since you're listed as a co-author, it's not plagiarism, just a lack of communication among the authors. Get in touch with your professor and ask what's going on, he can probably explain the conventions of the field. Each subject area is different - in some fields, for instance neuroscience, the last author is generally the dude who is in charge of the lab where the research happened and who signed off on the paper, even if he didn't do any of the work or write any of the words.
However, if you did the majority of the work on the paper, then it is your right - your right - to be listed as the first author, and you should get in touch with the guys behind it and ask a) why you weren't consulted and b) why you weren't listed as the first author.
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