Editorial pubs.acs.

org/ac

Two Unrelated Items to Avoid, One for Me and One for You
riting and publishing a well-crafted research article takes eort, as does editing and producing a successful journal such as Analytical Chemistry. Here I make what may be a poor attempt to tie the two together. Let us start out with one critical and perhaps obvious statement: using the words of others in your paper is unacceptable and unethical.1 Yes, even taking a few sentences from another article is inappropriate. This is known as plagiarism, and most of us understand the inherent issues in terms of both copyright and ethics. Plagiarism is dened as taking the words from another person, verbatim, and presenting them as your own; some narrow the denition as taking more than some arbitrary number of words from another author, with the number being as small as eight. Given such compound descriptions as matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time of ight mass spectrometry, or even the sentence: All chemicals were purchased from Sigma Aldrich at the highest available purity unless otherwise noted, I think we all understand that a one size ts all denition does not work, especially in scientic publishing. Nonetheless, most of us recognize that we should not copy from prior published work. If in doubt about a specic usage, ask a colleague or even an editoror simply do not take the risk. There is a second concern related to this discussionreusing your own (previously published) words. This also involves copyright issues and a dierent set of ethical standards, as well as a value judgment, and is also considered unethical. Does this happen often? I am not sure about the statistics, but you should not expect to get away with this. We live in an age of vast computational resources that allow wholesale text mining. And let me give a warning to all. In keeping with industry trends, the ACS is experimenting with antiplagiarism detection software, and I expect the day is not far o when all articles submitted to Analytical Chemistry will be checked with text mining software. Why am I writing about this? As Editor-in-Chief, I recently received a listing of abstracts provided by an outside entity that were published in Analytical Chemistry over the past 30 years and were suspiciously like other abstracts published in the broad area of other scientic journals. The good news is that the list consists of less than 20 abstracts. I found these examples of potential scientic misconduct interesting... most of the similar abstract pairs were from the same authors and seemed to imply that they grew somewhat lazy in their writing. They either published an article using one technique and decided to use another on the same samples, or they developed a marvelous approach and applied it to two distinct samples thus publishing two closely related papers while using some of the same language in both. Perhaps unconsciously, the authors started with the rst abstract rather than writing a new one from scratch, changing just a few critical words. Once this was called to my attention, I examined some of these articles more closely and discovered many paragraphs in these selected bad examples that had been heavily inuenced by writings in their prior work. Of course, I am not going to identify the authors here. Nevertheless, I urge you to make my job easier: do not copy yourself. Please show o your writing skills by rewriting
2012 American Chemical Society

every single part of your manuscript each time you submit your work. This is not only a suggestion; it is a requirement. OK, now that I have admonished authors for a crime most of you do not commit, it is the time to call out some editors...this time about an editorial practice I nd hard to believe. First some background. Many authors select a journal based on its reputation, and this is at least partially driven by supposedly quantitative values such as the Impact Factor. While one can argue about the importance of the Impact Factor, at least it is impartial and the rules are understood.2 Because it is so well used, even if also abused, editors (such as yours truly) want to be able to convince the Powers that Be (whomever they are) that we are doing a good job. What better approach than to show these Powers that the Impact Factor of the journal is headed up Up UP! To critics of the Impact Factor, I acknowledge that there are ways to inuence the number of citations to a journal. The most obvious is to increase the number of more highly cited article types, such our Reviews, Features, and Perspectives, which are typically cited more frequently than primary research articles. This is within an editors purview, and I would argue that it is a more legitimate means of increasing average citation numbers and thus, the Impact Factor. Evidently, several journals/editors have found some more creative ways to manipulate the Impact Factor. In an article on this subject, Wikipedia.org3 mentions several examples of tactics journals have used. One is to publish an article that lists all of the articles published in that journal in the past year (an instant boost of a journals Impact Factor). Another means to increase citations is to publish a technique in a journal and in that article, encourage authors who use the approach to cite the original work, a practice that can dramatically increase the Impact Factor for a journal. Finally, we get to my point. As a more subtle, but in my opinion dishonest approach, there are instances where a journals editorial sta have instructed authors to cite more articles from their journal as a general approach unrelated to scientic issues. This cite our journal approach is highlighted in Wilhite and Fong.4 Has this happened to you? I have yet to hear about this in chemistry publishing but encourage you to take a survey posted on C&EN5 and share your thoughts. If this is happening, I certainly hope that the weight of our communitys opinions can contribute to changing this practice. In summary, I have given two pieces of advice. First, when composing a manuscript do not take exact language from other writings, including your own. Second, while you should respond to reviewer comments on scientic content and address a lack of appropriate citations to existing literature, do not allow editors to tell you to cite articles from their journal that are not directly tied to reviewer-raised concerns on content and science. These are two simple rubrics for all of us to observe, with the objective being to ensure that the scientic literature is regarded
Published: May 16, 2012
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Analytical Chemistry as being independent and thus respected, a goal that benets science as a whole.

Editorial

Jonathan V. Sweedler

REFERENCES

(1) ACS Ethical Guidelines, see http://pubs.acs.org/userimages/ ContentEditor/1218054468605/ethics.pdf (2) The Thomson Reuters Impact Factor, see http:// thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/free/essays/impact_ factor/ (3) Wikipedia.org, see the listing for Impact Factor at http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor. (4) Wilhite, A. W.; Fong, E. A. Research Ethics: Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing Science 2012, 335, 542543. See http://www. sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120202164817.htm (5) Wilhite, A. W.; Fong, E. A. Are Editors Coercing Citations? Chem. Eng. News 2012, 90, 4. See http://cen.acs.org/articles/90/i14/ Editors-Coercing-Citations.html

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