There are many cases of scientists independently arriving at the same idea, but normally plagiarism means that one has directly copied from anothers work, as evidenced by similar or identical wording.
Theft of ideas is harder to prove. Sometimes someone is sitting on an idea, then finds out that someone else is about to publish, so he rushes into print. That is a harder issue to address. Since some of the posters on this topic write from an editorial perspective, I would add that the worst case of (attempted) theft of ideas occurred back in the 1970s when I submitted a paper to the American Naturalist. After waiting for a decision for about a year and receiving no reply to numerous letters I went to their office and spoke to the editor in person. He informed me that he had sent the ms. to a member of their editorial board, who replied that he had a student working on the same problem and asked that he hold up the ms. until the student had a chance to publish. Wow! (The paper was of course withdrawn and very quickly accepted by Math. Biosci.) Bill Silvert ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Bryant" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU> Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2006 4:54 PM Subject: Re: Plagiarism and ESA policy > Robert et al; > > The comments below pertain only to scholarly publication and NOT > classroom/student plagiarism: > > How does one distinguish between plagiarism and contemporaneous > development of similar ideas? > > Leibniz and Newton both developed calculus during the same period and > recent evidence suggests that Archimedes developed the idea a few > hundred years previously. Who gets credit and who is > "plagiarizing"? Similarly, Alfred Wallace sent a manuscript to > Darwin containing virtually the identical concept of Chuck's natural > selection. What if he had sent the manuscript for publication, > would Darwin have a case for plagiarism even though the two had never > met? > > How do we know that so called plagiarists are not simply > independently arriving at the same concept? > > David Bryant > Ipswich, MA
