Long and the colleagues, in their research titled “responding to possible plagiarism,” found 212 of 9,120 academic articles were sharing references with each other or had “similar or identical tables or figures.” Long and the colleagues were curious about why these scientists did not scan themselves before scaning “scientific” items. They proceeded to contact those scientists involved. These suspected of duplication, the original authors, and the editors who accepted the duplicated articles for publications were interviewed with questionnaires.

The authors’ responses seemed to be more interesting than their “research.” Some directly denied any suspicion of their misconducts, arguing that they just referred to other’s research and might have something in common with the original ones by coincidence. Conservatively, 35% admitted their wrongdoings. Almost 40% assigned the responsibilities to their coauthors, addressing that they did not get involved in the writing process or even know their names were listed as coauthors.

As for the editors, most did not indicate any interest in taking further action against the misconduct cases. Among those who did launch investigations, only half retracted the duplicate articles. Because the editors just published their comments on journals or deleted the problematic articles from their web sites, the authors eventually survived any further punishments. Long and colleagues attributed their responses to the fear that further investigation might dishonor their review process and dismiss the journals’ prestige.

The research proposed that, in addition to trusting the scientists’ integrity, the editors of academic journals should take the responsibilities of verifying the articles’ originality. Similar responsibility should also apply to the anonymous reviewers, despite their voluntary work.