#ginsparg

New analyses of the hundreds of thousands of technical manuscripts submitted to arXiv, the repository of digital preprint articles, are offering some intriguing insights into the consequences–and geography–of scientific plagiarism. It appears that copying text...

Conventional wisdom says that scientists are most creative with their ideas when they are young. Darwin and Planck both claimed that young researchers were more responsive to new ideas than older colleagues, and funders like the US National Institute of Health now have policies that specifically support young scientists.

But how valid is this claim? Economists Mikko Packmen and Jay Bhattacharya decided to investigate this idea by taking a look at the most innovative articles from 1946 to 2011 and the career ages of the scientists who published those articles. They found that young scientists were more innovative with their ideas than older scientists.  

The trail of manuscripts posted to the preprint server arXiv shows how cosmologists rapidly embraced, then doubted and gradually lost interest in one of last year’s most sensational announcements: the discovery of gravitational waves generated at the birth of the Universe, according to this story in Nature.

Soon after the announcement last March, papers questioning the result started to emerge. The final nail in the coffin came last week, when researchers officially conceded that dust in the Milky Way was responsible for the signal seen by the South Pole-based telescope BICEP2.

New analyses of the hundreds of thousands of technical manuscripts submitted to arXiv, the repository of digital preprint articles, are offering some intriguing insights into the consequences—and geography—of scientific plagiarism, according to this article from Science.

Paul Ginsparg, professor of physics and founder of arXiv, worked with physics Ph.D. student Daniel Citron to explore some of the consequences of "text reuse," comparing the text from each of the 757,000 articles submitted to arXiv between 1991 and 2012.

The headline from that study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) is that the more text a paper poaches from already published work, the less frequently that paper tends to be cited. (The full paper is also available for free on arXiv.) It also found that text reuse is surprisingly common. 

Physics Prof. Paul Ginsparg, founder of Cornell's Arxiv, an online journal for scientific research, is quoted in this story about Nature’s decision to allow non-subscribers to access papers on its site. Arxiv publishes preprints -- the versions of papers that haven't necessarily passed the peer-review process.

Ginsparg said that journals like Nature play an important role besides just publishing papers.