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I had a research article posted in arXiv on November 2020 and it is currently in review by a leading journal, I call it J1. Today when I was browsing research papers, I found that a research paper has been published in a lower tier journal (let's call it J2) and it has one section with ideas that are very similar to mine. The paper published in J2 was sent for review on 1st Feb 2021 and it got accepted on 15th Aug, 2021 (per the dates given on the website of the journal).

The section which is similar to mine has results which form the main idea of the paper and I find that it has been allegedly stolen. I am amazed how my paper which is already on arXiv can get scooped like this. Obviously the wording has been changed by the authors but the main idea in the section is the same as mine.

I am confused what should I do now. How do I prove the plagiarism, whom should I reach, and how should I approach this? Is the fact that their results in Sec 1 are similar to mine and I have published it first on arXiV not a valid claim to prove that my work has been scooped?

I am in my PhD days and the author who has done this is an Assistant Professor.

Note: By "similar" I mean that the results obtained in Section 1 of the paper in J2 and the results obtained in my paper in J1 are the same. The other sections of the paper i.e. Sections 2 and 3 in J2 are different from mine. But the results in Sec. 1 are very important and form a base for the other sections of the both the papers in J1 and J2.

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Charlotte
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    what do you mean by "exactly similar"? Similar or identical? – henning Sep 29 '21 at 14:25
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    Are you sure the other authors did not come up with the same idea independently? Do you have any specific reason to believe they stole it from your paper? – GoodDeeds Sep 29 '21 at 14:26
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    @henning; by similar I mean the idea is similar with wordings changed, yes you can call it identical – Charlotte Sep 29 '21 at 14:27
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    @GoodDeeds; even if they come up with it independently , they should have cited my paper in which the idea has appeared first and published in arXiv – Charlotte Sep 29 '21 at 14:28
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    Sure, but in that scenario "stolen" is too strong, it suggests malicious intent. That's one possibility, the other is that they simply did not know of the existence of your paper (especially given how many papers get put on arXiv these days). I am not sure what you should do (since the other paper is already published), hopefully someone will provide a good answer. – GoodDeeds Sep 29 '21 at 14:33
  • @GoodDeeds; is it not necessary to study thoroughly before publishing something? – Charlotte Sep 29 '21 at 14:35
  • Why the downvotes?please explain – Charlotte Sep 29 '21 at 14:36
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    Related discussion from the opposite perspective (not a duplicate): https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/163374/68109 – GoodDeeds Sep 29 '21 at 14:49
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    Did you talk to your PhD advisor about this? – Jeroen Sep 29 '21 at 14:54
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    @Math_Freak Many similar ideas pop up at the same time. The are - so to say - in the air. E.g. calculus, for a famous example. Heisenberg and Schroedinger, for another one (although equivalence was not obvious at the beginning). So, unless you can really make the point that they really copied nonobvious statements from you, you should be careful with the word "stolen". As for studying previous work, yes that should be done. But there are so many publications that it is impossible to be sure one covered everything. Many ideas get forgotten and rediscovered multiple times, in all honesty. – Captain Emacs Sep 29 '21 at 15:01
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    I did not downvote, but I suspect many of these negative responses have to do with the work stoten in the title. Not even "allegedly stolen" as the newspapers do. – Terry Loring Sep 29 '21 at 15:03
  • @CaptainEmacs; So how should I prove that it is stolen, Should I quote their results and my results and show they are similar? Can you please help? – Charlotte Sep 29 '21 at 15:06
  • @Jeroen; I am the sole author of this paper – Charlotte Sep 29 '21 at 15:16
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    "Why the downvotes?" I did not downvote, but in my opinion the problem with this post is that you did not show anything that would suggest that the authors of that paper were even aware of your work, yet you catergorically claim that they stole your idea. If you truly believe that they knew about your work, you should explain why. "the main idea in the section is the same as mine" is simply not convincing—it could be entirely accidental. If there is anything else, mention it. – Szabolcs Sep 29 '21 at 15:16
  • @Szabolcs; because my paper is available in arXiv and their paper deals with same topic as mine – Charlotte Sep 29 '21 at 15:19
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    As said in several comments above, it is not an infrequent occurrence that two people arrive to the same idea independently. – Szabolcs Sep 29 '21 at 15:22
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    So... I would suggest a rewrite of the question. Instead of asking "how do I prove", ask something like "How do I determine if deliberate plagiarism was involved here, and what can/should I do if it was? What can/should I do if it was not?" Even if there was no deliberate plagiarism (negligence rather than malfeasance) you should still have options. – Ben Barden Sep 29 '21 at 15:49
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    Only having a similar result reproduced is not "stolen", but yes, you can ask for your result to be cited if you were first. If you suspect that the authors lifted precise formulations from your paper (e.g. because they might have been reviewers), you could alert the editor. Note that with having your paper on arXiv, you can prove priority. Generally, I would advise talking to your advisor. Proving plagiarism is not easy, but can be achieved by finding uncommon formulations. So, "Let V be a vector space" (or similar) does not count. – Captain Emacs Sep 29 '21 at 16:19
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    "My paper is available in arXiv" is not a valid argument why the entire academic community should know about it. – Ian Sep 29 '21 at 17:08
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    Expanding on @Ian's comment, it is quite possible that not only did the authors of this paper not read your arXiv submission, but the reviewers didn't, either, otherwise they likely would have recognized the similarity and suggested to the authors that they cite your preprint. – Bryan Krause Sep 29 '21 at 18:08
  • This is why you don't sit in arXiv papers. You submit for publication right away. – Scott Seidman Sep 30 '21 at 15:08
  • It is a bit unclear how "similar" the results are. If one author was to measure body temperature simply by using a thermometer, and another author measures it by taking infrared images, the result would be the same but the way to the result would be completely different. – Dohn Joe Oct 01 '21 at 11:15

4 Answers4

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Simultaneous discovery of research ideas is an entirely normal occurrence in academic research. It happened to me several times over my career so far, and I’m just one guy — some versions of this happen to practically everyone who works in crowded, competitive research areas.

I am confused what should I do now.

What should you do? First of all, take a deep breath and think very carefully about the seriousness of your accusations and whether they are substantiated by hard evidence. You have at least one very clear misconception in your post and follow-up comments, namely the belief that other people must know about your work if they are working in the same area, because it is posted on arXiv. That’s absolutely not true. How would you feel if someone accused you of misconduct because you failed to cite a relevant paper of which you were unaware? Have you read all the literature in your field? I bet you wouldn’t feel that that was a very fair accusation if someone accused you of stealing someone’s work that you never even heard about.

After taking a deep breath, my suggestion is that you show both your paper and the other one to an adviser or senior colleague, and ask for their advice on how to proceed. Quite possibly there isn’t anything you need to do — mathematics journals are quite tolerant of publishing independent discoveries, and in any case your posting to arXiv will establish precedence in the unlikely event that people care enough about this to make an issue of who has priority over the ideas. You may want to contact the authors of the other paper and point them, diplomatically and without any hint of accusation of wrongdoing, to your own work. And you may even want to cite their paper or add a discussion to your paper of how their ideas relate to yours — that depends a bit too much on the details so I don’t feel I can advise you precisely. Regardless, please don’t accuse people of stealing ideas based on such flimsy evidence. That is a very serious matter and could badly hurt your reputation.

Dan Romik
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So far, nothing in your question at all indicates they have indeed stolen your results. You can claim you came up with them earlier, but the history of science has had plenty of occasions where the same results were formulated independently with years, sometimes even decades or centuries (!) separating them. This seems the most likely conclusion.

In general though, if you have a more reasonable suspicion (similar or identical wording, order of points they make, similar-looking data, sometimes even stolen figures), that is an ethical issue to be raised with the editorial board of J2. Make sure to have proofs, and these proofs should be as rigid as the proofs in the articles you're writing.

Lodinn
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It could be that the paper in J2 first appeared as a preprint much earlier than Feb 1, 2021. It could be also that it was first submitted to another journal and was rejected there. So before you make any accusations, you should contact the authors of the paper published in J2.

markvs
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    Actually you should contact them for lots of reasons. But don't contact them with an accusation. – Buffy Sep 29 '21 at 16:15
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Your arXiv preprint shows that you had the idea first. Does the subsequent paper in J2 harm you in any way? You can still demonstrably claim credit for your work in subsequent papers, job applications, etc.

Finding whether there was plagiarism or not, in addition to being difficult, would not be useful to you. It might be useful to your competitors' employers and more generally to the community, but this is probably someone else's business.

Sylvain Ribault
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