http://www.eurekajournalwatch.org/in...sm_Ring_Affair
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Originally Posted by Eureka
In August of 2007, the technology-oriented website Ars Technica[1] revealed that the arXiv was withdrawing a set of seventeen physics papers due to plagiarism. These papers had been written by a group of graduate students at the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey. After detecting the plagiarism, METU faculty began a process which Ars Technica called "damage control", requesting that the Journal of High Energy Physics withdraw a fraudulent article,[2] and working with arXiv administrators to further the removal process.[3] The total number of withdrawals eventually rose to sixty-five articles by fourteen authors,[4] at four Turkish institutions.[5]
Throughout this article, papers and eprints designated as "plagiarized" have been marked so by arXiv administrators or other sources external to EUREKA.
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Sad. This clearly hurts the University, but I bring it up here because of
Eureka author's statement:
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Originally Posted by Eureka
Members of the physics community are still uncertain how severe the damage from this incident will transpire to be. Paul Ginsparg, a physics professor and central figure behind the arXiv, contended that the derivative nature of the plagiarized work minimized the harm it could bring about: "There's little effect on science, since the people who produce high quality work don't need to plagiarize, and the people who do need to plagiarize don't produce high enough quality work to affect anything.
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I point this out because there is another, more subtle harm caused by copycat papers, whether they qualify as plagiarism or not.: The more papers that seem to reach the same conclusion, the greater the belief placed in the conclusion of the paper(s) by the community at-large.
I don't think there is a lot of this kind of thing going on, but this is just one more reason to be cautious of the bandwagon effect: As much as possible you should draw your own conclusions about a topic, and not just follow the most generally accepted line bindly and without reason. Obviously we can't all be experts on everything, but we can try to avoid blindly beating the drum when no one is really sure of the correct cadence.