Via Mike Trick's twitter feed I learn of a case of plagiarism published on SIAM's web site. Most of the papers that were plagiarized seem to be in operations research, but one of them is computational geometry: one of the victimized authors is Godfried Toussaint, whose paper (copied by the plagiarists) concerns a one-dimensional geometric matching problem for testing how similar two point sets are that is somewhat related to the calculation of Haussdorff distance.

To me the most interesting part of the story is the lack of response from the journals and universities associated with the plagiarists. Do they hope to avoid publicity by keeping the story quiet? But by failing to respond they have prompted SIAM to take this public step, and made themselves look like collaborators in the plagiarism.




Comments:

None:
2009-10-26T22:31:46Z
I would word this post more carefully. On first read of your post I took the mistaken impression that Toussaint was the plagiarist; not so.
11011110:
2009-10-26T22:34:51Z
That would be an unfortunate conclusion to draw from this incident. I've reworded in a way that I hope is less ambiguous.
None:
2009-10-27T02:01:42Z
Amazing. The plagiarist(s) didn't even redraw the figures!
11011110:
2009-10-27T02:17:34Z

Amazing. The plagiarist(s) didn't even redraw the figures!

That would b actual work.

(For some reason your comment isn't showing up for me, despite the fact that I received the email notification for it and can reach a page for posting replies to it. Glitch in the Matrix LiveJournal's software, I guess...)