Publishing nightmare: a researcher’s quest to keep his own work from being plagiarized

Abstract

When bioinformatician Sam Payne was asked to review a manuscript on a topic relevant to his own work, he agreed — not anticipating just how relevant it would be. The manuscript, which was sent to Payne in March, was about a study on the effect of cell sample sizes for protein analysis. “I immediately recognized it,” says Payne, who is at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The text, he says, was similar to that of a paper1 he’d authored three years earlier, but the most striking feature was the plots: several were identical down to the last data point. He fired off an e-mail to the journal, BioSystems, which promptly rejected the manuscript.