Realized a co-author inserted plagiarism into our paper 8 years ago - what to do now?

Question

Recently, after the acceptance of a paper, the journal said some sentences were exactly copied in my manuscript. I was shocked as I was the first author. Later, we found that during the preparation of the revised manuscript, one of the co-authors exactly copied two sentences from a reference. This brought fear in my mind if I had ever been a co-author in an unintentionally plagiarized paper. I got access to the Turnitin from a friend at a different institute and checked all my previous papers.

I realized that 8-10 years ago, a visiting student in my lab had significant portions of the published papers plagiarized. The data and analysis were correctly done in my supervision, but significant parts of introduction, methods and some places discussion were plagiarized. I had read and edited the drafts of the papers, but I didn't realize that he had copied text from other papers. Generally, most sources are cited. The student already earned a PhD based on the work.

At that time, no-one in our country had access to the plagiarism detection software from institutions.

What should I do now?

Answer 1

Move on. In the abstract, of course, we should care about these things but, in reality, a paper that has been out there for 8-10 years has passed the statute of limitations. It is exceedingly unlikely that anyone will go back and check papers that old -- indeed, even if someone finds textual overlap with other sources, it will require quite a lot of work and human intervention to determine who copied from whom.

The point for you to take away is this: You learned a lesson to be more careful in the future. That's a good thing from your perspective, and it will make sure that you won't get into a potentially embarrassing situation again in the future. In the meantime, relax.

Answer 2

You should contact the official at the visiting student's PhD institution who is responsible for academic integrity. They should investigate the student's thesis for plagiarism, potentially leading to the revocation of the PhD degree.

For the visiting student's publication, you should contact the journal and let them decide what to do. I would guess they would decide to issue a correction.

Answer 3

I strongly recommend to contact the editor of the journal involved and explain the situation. Yes, this may lead to a retraction or expression of concern, but that is still better than to sit on this information, and ( more likely than not ) someone else finding out. For guidance you can check the retraction policy of the publisher. Certainly the larger publishers ( Wiley, Springer, Elsevier, etc ) have this information online. Full disclosure - I work for a publisher.

Answer 4

No, there's no "statute of limitation" on plagiarism. It's a lot like murder in that way. I've had people complain to me that they had their work plagiarized by papers that were published 10 years earlier - it happens and the likelihood increases with time as the papers are there forever. You report it to the journal where your work was published; that's it, no other options. If in doubt, check out this web site: https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Guidelines The editor will evaluate the level of plagiarism and if it exists, will determine the appropriate course of action. It can range from publishing an erratum to a full-on retraction of the paper. In the future, before submitting a paper, always run it through plagiarism detection software or at least do a literature search on your abstract to see what else is out there. You'd be surprised how much plagiarism gets caught by very simple means.

Answer 5

Check if your institution have guidelines on plagiarism and follow them. If not, maybe discuss with some of your colleagues how you've been duped and recomend them to check their coauthored work. After all, your primary concern is about not falling victim of a plagiarism accusation in the future, so the best insurance for that should be some moral grandstanding.

Answer 6

The fact that you ask the question at all after all this time is impressive and speaks for itself. I would go with the advice given by @Wolfgang Bangerth although, of course, strictly speaking it would be the right way to report the issue and accept the consequences.

Let's say you would have commited some sort of offence in the 'real world', like shoplifting something small 10 years back without having been caught. Let's further assume you know it has been filmed by a camera, so there definitely is evidence and you were only not caught because for some reason nobody looked at the video. Would you report it? You maybe should, but many people would say it would not be wise given that the consequences of what you have done are small. Additionally, as far as I know, such as 'minor' issue falls under the Statute of Limitations after five years in Germany (where I live). So you could talk about what you have done without fearing any (legal) consequences. I am not sure if such a concept exists at all in academia, but this concept makes sense so me. Nobody was hurt, and the damage is also rather small. Staying in this picture, something more severe like murder would be a totally different story.

So the answer to your question is given by answering another question: Where would you put your case? Do you think it is so severe that after such a long time it is still necessary to report it yourself, without anybody else even taking notice? Does it press so hard on your conscience? If so, go ahead and report it. However, my advice is different. We are all humans, and we all make mistakes.