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Indirect self-plagiarism?

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

Of the matter of the retraction of Nayernia group paper published in Stem Cells and Development on 8 July 09, the journal Science gave details that the plagiarism in question involved a word-for-word discussion of prior Nayernia group work taken from a review article by Makoto Nagano of McGill University in Montreal that appeared in Biology of Reproduction.

Why would research group X plagiarize a discussion of group X's work from author Y? This is a sort of indirect self-plagiarism. Had group X merely summarized and cited their own past work, there would be no problem at all.

The text from Science: Surprisingly, [editor Graham] Parker says, those introductory paragraphs describe previous work done by the authors of the new paper, raising questions about why such a passage would be plagiarized.

See also
British science paper on "sperm from stem cells" retracted!.

Full post as published by IPBiz on August 08, 2009 (boomark / email).