Sometimes this nightmare will come true. This is extremely depressing, because you have spent months or even years, made long-term struggles and efforts, and even spent many sleepless nights, but I didn't expect Cheng Jinyao to come halfway and publish a study similar to yours. It is possible that your reviewer has your manuscript in his hand. Maybe it's really that the quality of your manuscript is not high. Maybe he has been selfish, and you don't know who the judge is. This is really a dead end. So what should we do? After months or even years of hard work, we can't just burn it! However, if you can't produce evidence of plagiarism, can you just admit it? If you find an enemy ahead, of course, you must first look at where the other party is from. Carefully examine articles similar to your research, and then make tit-for-tat strategies. There are two possible situations.
First, the quality of the other article is not good.
This is a relatively easy situation, and I am lucky. We can grasp each other's weaknesses for objective analysis, including their understanding of related issues, the defects in experimental design and operation, and even the interpretation of experimental results, so as to further explore and correct obvious mistakes, and then put forward and emphasize our own innovations and advantages. But it's best not to have resentment. Even if there are obvious mistakes in the other party's article, the wording should be calm and objective to avoid attacking attitude. Second, if the other party's article is impeccable, don't attack directly, or take a detour or use it for your own use. You may need to reprocess the data or even supplement experiments to increase the data, reanalyze your own experimental results, find out the parts that do not overlap with the published articles, and then switch the discussion of the articles to this angle to deepen. Or there is a way to turn an enemy into a friend, that is, when the time difference is not very big, you can quote the other party's achievements as evidence. Without knowing it, two American scholars published similar research in ACP (the top magazine of air pollution) almost at the same time. A group later realized this and added a sentence to the article: "We have noticed the research by Hilde et al. (20 12) completed at the same time as this work, which solved some of the same problems and reported results similar to those presented here. Two independent studies have reached basically the same conclusion, which adds weight to the results of the two studies. "
If time is urgent, such as graduating immediately, applying for funds, evaluating professional titles, etc. How to quickly reverse the situation is the most important thing. In the face of this problem, if you can't solve it yourself, you'd better discuss it with your friends or tutors or colleagues in the research group to see how to deal with it. In fact, if this article is written by yourself from design to implementation, in this case, you can spend one to two weeks quickly studying the latest literature and combining with your long-term accumulation, and then carefully ponder the newly published article to check for leaks and fill gaps. On this basis, complete the new supplementary experiment as soon as possible, and it is estimated that it is no problem to complete another SCI within three to five months. In addition, with the help of friends, colleagues or mentors around you, it should be easy to solve the problem. Of course, the above is a bit absolute, especially for those who are about to graduate and apply for the Natural Science Foundation, they may not be able to catch up with this application (graduation or declaration), but it is also the best response.
If the time can be postponed for half a year or a year, then there are many solutions to this situation. After all, it is feasible to add half a year or a year on the original basis.
For example, a few years ago, a professor of Chinese Academy of Sciences published an almost similar article in the process of writing a paper, which was published in the TOP series. It can be said that his time and energy have been hit hard in recent years. It is reported that the professor worked behind closed doors for more than half a month, and finally redesigned a new idea, and then personally led a group of students to work overtime to do experiments, and finally published the article in CNS series journals one and a half years later.
Of course, under the above circumstances, although the project cannot be released or continued according to the original idea, it is still possible to modify it on the existing basis. No matter how similar the articles published by others are, they are still different. It is not a big problem to further study on the basis of the previous ones and find new breakthrough points before publishing them. Even if the article is robbed, it is not a good thing, but it is not necessarily a bad thing: after all, we can't stop our colleagues at home and abroad from publishing similar articles in advance. Just remember one thing: even the same article is different from your own.
No paper will be rejected because it was robbed. The editor of a periodical may refuse to publish it because it is not a novel, but I have never seen an article that was rejected because someone published a similar article a few months ago. Most editors and reviewers may not be aware of the existence of manuscript grabbing. You may find it hard to believe, because you think your paper takes time and is very important, but the statistics show that I am right. Of course, some reviewers know about the stolen articles, but they are not bad people and will not say, "A similar article was published three months ago, so your paper is boring."
No two pieces of paper in the world are exactly the same. You may think that the robbed paper is similar to your own paper, but unless they steal your idea (which is completely different) and copy it in advance (predict? ) your design, otherwise I bet there must be a huge difference between your two articles. Your research will not lose its value, and you should not quit academia or be unhappy.
Hey? I can't guarantee that the article was robbed as a compliment. But if you ask me, scientific knowledge is not a universal competition. You can study anything you want within the scope of ethics. But I admit that if others are also interested in my research, I will be encouraged. This means that they recognize your research and related papers. In fact, it means that you can afford the rent and mortgage! From the perspective of pure vanity, it is also reassuring, because it shows that you are not a madman who is engaged in a research project alone.
Hey? Being robbed has little to do with whether you can publish high-impact factors. Frankly speaking, in my opinion, whether the predecessors have done your research or the popularity of the topic is not the key factor for the publication of the paper in high-impact journals. The key is the novelty of technology, the breakthrough or reliability of achievements and the conciseness of expression.
Hey? If you clearly know that there is a research group with similar research direction in the world, and the competition is obvious, then you should guard against people. To write a good article, first send a pre-printed version on the Internet. For example, arXiv.org, a classic platform, was founded in 199 1 with the original intention of letting scholars seize the right to publish. At present, there are 165438+ ten thousand papers in the archives.
Cn.arxiv.org ArXiv.org China mirror station
Scholars can publish their own achievements on the platform first, and the time point of your achievements will be based on this, and then submit them to official publications. The website is now located at Cornell University, and there are several mirror stations around the world.