The Shape of Code

One trick academics use to increase their publication count is to publish very similar papers in different conferences/journals; they essentially plagiarize themselves. This practice is frowned upon, but unless referees spot the ‘duplication’, it is difficult to prevent such plagiarized versions being published. Sometimes the knock-off paper will include additional authors and may not include some of the original authors.

How do people feel about independent authors publishing a paper where all the interesting material was derived from someone else’s paper, i.e., no joint authors? I have just encountered such a case in empirical software engineering.

“Software Cost Estimation: Present and Future” by Siba N. Mohanty from 1981 (cannot find a non-paywall pdf via Google; must exist because I have a copy) has been reworked to create “Cost Estimation: A Survey of Well-known Historic Cost Estimation Techniques” by Syed Ali Abbas and Xiaofeng Liao and Aqeel Ur Rehman and Afshan Azam and M. I. Abdullah (published in 2012; pdf here); they cite Mohanty as the source of their data, some thought has obviously gone into the reworked material and I found it useful and there is a discussion on techniques created since 1981.

What makes the 2012 stand out as interesting is the depth of analysis of the 1970s models and the data, all derived from the 1981 paper. The analysis of later models is not as interesting and doe snot include any data.

The 2012 paper did ring a few alarm bells (which rang a lot more loudly after I read the 1981 paper):

• Why was such a well researched and interesting paper published in such an obscure (at least to me) journal? I have encountered such cases before and had email conversations with the author(s). The well-known journals have not always been friendly towards empirical research, so an empirical paper appearing in less than a stellar publication is not unusual.

  As regular readers will know I am always on the look-out for software engineering data and am willing to look far and wide. I judge a paper by its content, not the journal it was published in

• Why, in 2012, were researchers comparing effort estimation models proposed in the 1970s? Well, I am, so why not others? It did seem odd that I could not track down papers on some of the models cited, perhaps the pdfs had disappeared since 2012??? I think I just wanted to believe others were interested in what I was interested in.

What now? Retraction watch offers some advice.

The Journal of Emerging Trends in Computing and Information Sciences has an ethics page, I will email them a link to this post and see what happens (the article in question is listed as their second most cited article last year, with 19 citations).