The Ugly World of Plagiarism

Science is based on the honesty and integrity of its practitioners.  Even a small fraction of dishonest acts such as fudging data or plagiarism can be very costly.  As such, we all need to be vigilant to punish those who break the rules.

This hit close to home when over a decade ago, one of my papers was plagiarized.  (Click here for an example of how an academic who had plagiarized my work was punished by loosing his job.) I was impressed by the actions taken by the journal that had received the tainted manuscript, and the administrators at the perpetrator's institution who took decisive actions.

Just this morning, I got a letter from a colleague who just discovered that a paper recently appeared in a prestigious journal that basically copied his work and lifted whole sections from his previous paper without acknowledging him or citing his papers.  He wanted my opinion on the topic, and here was my response:

Dear Prof. Colleague,

Plagiarism is a horrible corruption of the scientific process, that like a cancer, could compromise science if it is not dealt with vigilance.  You might want to check out my case (http://www.nlosource.com/PlagiarismCase.html) to see how I responded and how the ordeal was settled.  In your case, the other paper has already appeared, and journals might be reluctant to accuse the offending parties in fear of a lawsuit.  In my case, the act of plagiarism was caught by an astute postdoc that reviewed the offending manuscript and alerted the editor before it was published.
 
If I were to find myself in your situation, I would probably contact both Journal A and Journal B editors to get their opinion on a course of action that they are willing to take.  At minimum,Journal A  should at least print some sort of correction that includes citations to your work.  That way, you would at least get credit in the citation indices.  You might also want to write the authors to confront them; but, you may want to check with your university's legal department first.
 
Note that I was not able to open the links to the papers since one was to a server from your university that requires a password.  However, from your description, I think that you should take action.
 
Thanks for sending me a copy of your pre-print on two-photon absorption.  This is a beautiful paper that I would like to read carefully when I have some more time.  Once the paper appears, can you send me a copy?  Since it will undoubtedly be very useful to my group, I want to add it to my database of references.  I have skimmed through the manuscript and was wondering if you took cascading into account and if the concentration dependence might be telling you something about it.  I apologize in advance if this is a stupid question based on my cursory reading.
 
Finally, have you given any thought to hosting a "sum rules and scaling" meeting at your university?  I am thinking about keeping it small, perhaps with a dozen attendees, so that we could concentrate on bouncing around new ideas.  Let me know your thoughts.
 
Always glad to hear from you, though it would have been better under happier circumstances.  Keep in touch.

Best,
Mark

The editors too like our weird paper

Shoresh forwarded this wonderful email to me this morning:
 
Re: AF10984

Paradox of the many-state catastrophe of fundamental limits and the three-state conjecture,

by Shoresh Shafei and Mark G. Kuzyk Dear Mr. Shafei, We are pleased to inform you that your paper has been selected by the editors of Physical Review A to be an Editors' Suggestion.

As a service to both our readers and authors, we are listing a small number of Physical Review A papers that the editors and referees find of particular interest, importance, or clarity.  These Editors' Suggestion papers are listed prominently on http://pra.aps.org/ and marked with a special icon in the print and online Tables of Contents and in online searches.

See http://pra.aps.org/#suggestions for a list of the most recently published Editors' Suggestions. A list of all published Editors' Suggestions can be obtained via a search of our journal content (http://publish.aps.org/search).

Congratulations and thank you for submitting your paper to Physical Review A.

Yours sincerely,
Frank Narducci
Associate Editor
Physical Review A
Email: pra@aps.org 
http://pra.aps.org/

So it appears that not only the reviewers, but the editors also liked our paper enough to make the Editors' Suggestion list.  A nice way for me to finish the first week of classes and for Shoresh to end his days at WSU as he moves on to a postdoc position back east.

Perhaps I'll take a break to celebrate.

The daily double - two papers for the price of one

It all stared as a final project in nonlinear optics class. Each group of students were assigned a project that applied to what they learned in class to an interesting question. One group was given the task to investigate whether or not cascading, the use of two lower-order nonlinearities to mimic a higher-order one, could be used to beat the fundamental limits. When I was first asked this question by a colleague, I responded in the negative based on the fact that my calculations were general, and applied to a pair of molecules that interact through cascading as well as to a single molecule.

However, upon reflection, I wondered if we could learn something new while studying this process. To get to the punchline, we found that cascading does not break the limit. However, what started as an average-length paper grew into two huge papers. As often happens, our first calculation missed an important case, which presented an assortment of issues that each required deep thought. In the end, we learned a great deal that we felt was of sufficient significance to warrant publication in the Physics Review.

We sent the papers to Physical Review A, and waited. Because our papers are complex, the journal had difficulty finding multiple qualified reviewers. Instead, they chose a highly distinguished individual (we believe that we know his identity based on the style and tone of the review), who reviewed the two papers together. The review started off a bit negative,

"These two manuscripts form a series devoted to the theoretical analysis of the contribution of cascading to second hyperpolarizability of molecules. Cascading is for sure a very interesting phenomenon in non linear optics, far from being well understood and easy to rationalize, and therefore the effort made by Kuzyk and co-workers is for sure welcome. Nevertheless, after reading the two manuscripts, having appreciated the mastering of the microscopic theory for the limit cases studied, with all the approximations involved, I am not sure that I have discovered something either new or unexpected applying to the real world. To be more precise, I am not sure I was given a clue of why experiment on real molecules behaves as it does."

The next paragraph offered that, "The papers report a nice theoretical study, well written and also entertaining of some very very special cases (point like molecules, with one-dimensional symmetry, interacting only in very special arrangements, and with many other approximations) with no direct (at least transparent) insight into the complicacies of real systems...," followed by some detailed criticisms.

The review concluded with, "Now, to make a long story short. The papers are in my view publishable, since the science is solid, the topic is interesting and the general field of research relevant. In order to enhance the chance that these papers do not remain nice case studies of academic interest, the authors should in my view..."

Since the reviewer brought up some valid points, we made extensive revisions to address each and every point, at times developing new and more general theories and running more simulations. The size of the papers grew, but I beleive that the final product is much improved.

The reviewer and the editor agree. This morning, we got an email that opened with: "We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been accepted for publication as a Regular Article in Physical Review A. We would also like to bring the appended referee comments to your attention," which reads, "I am fully satisfied with the changes made by the authors. I believe that the papers convey now the information much more efficiently. I have no further comments."

Congratulations to Nathan, Ben, and Jennie for a job well done! Ironically, these papers were accepted on the day of Nathan's wedding. What a great present!

Finally, after 4 years!

During my summer stay at the University of Leuven in 2006, I was working with my colleagues on interpreting data from new experiments using the intrinsic hyperpolarizability as a guide. That was when we discovered that modulation of conjugation was a new approach for making molecules with larger nonlinearities. It was an exciting time that eventually led to a paper that hit the internet in January 2007.

It caused quite a sensation. The morning that it appeared, I had a pile of emails in my inbox from reporters. My collaborator was even interviewed on Belgian TV. The Inquirer, a British publication, called us boffins (at first I thought it was a derogatory term). CBC News, ScienceBase, Materials World, Nature, and many others also covered the story.

In the midst of all this mayhem, we were working on another project. Who would have guessed that it would be 4 years from the initial idea until the work was finally published. I mentioned this work a while back in a post as being finally done, but as it turns out, it wasn't. We kept on finding mistakes.

While this work will most likely not get as much attention as our paper from 2007, it is perhaps a much better piece of work because it carefully shows how a combination of sum rules and symmetry can be used to reduce a complex problem into a simple one. With all of the complexity removed, it becomes easier to build an understanding of the physics underlying the phenomena that we observe. This is another paper that I rank in my top ten. I predict that this paper will get less citations than my top-40 cited papers, but those statistics are unimportant to me.

The title of the paper is Experimental verification of a self-consistent theory of the first-, second-, and third-order (non)linear optical response, by Javier Perez-Moreno, Sheng-Ting Hung, Mark G. Kuzyk, Juefei Zhou, Shiva K. Ramini, and Koen Clays. It is slated to appear in Physics Review A -- a journal I consider to be top notch. No glitz, no fancy photos, just hard core Physics.

Xavi must have been thrilled when he got the letter:

Dear Dr. Perez-Moreno,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been accepted
for publication as a Regular Article in Physical Review A.

His email to his coauthors tells it all:

After 3.5 years of revisions, I think we learned a lot about AF455 and octupoles in general, group theory, fluorescence, quantum yields; but, it has paid off. I feel very proud of this paper!

Xavi

I agree!

An exhausting paper is finally done

On August 8th, 2010, I reported that we finally completed a piece of work that over the last few years found us oscillating from moment to moment between peaks of elation and troughs of depression. We have finally competed the manuscript, and it will be submitted for publication shortly. My email to my coauthors says it all:

Dear Coauthors,

I am attaching the final version of our long-awaited paper. I believe that it is finally ready to go out for review.

I want to praise Shengting and Xavi for doing a marvelous job of doing the hard work of applying group theory to a complex molecule that ended up leading to a simple but powerful result. I also thank each of you for your hard work at various stages of this project.

For me, this was the most exhausting piece of work ever, but I think that the results were worth the wait. If there are no objections, I am directing Xavi to submit the paper to Physical Review A and to update the paper on the archives.

If we ever meet again in the same geographic location, we deserve to have a party!