Plagiarism in scientific writing.

Although it is not possible with certainty to know the exact date of the first scientific report, with scientific and technological contribution the ancient civilizations like China, Greece, and Babylon can be attributed to the earliest scientific reporting. 1 During the era of ancient Greek, these scientific reporting and communications took a different turn, shifting from oral to written communications. Because of short supply of scrolls, these communications became more systematic and organized laying the base for modern scientific writing. From ancient Greek, the scientific writing moved through Latin and eventually to English and other languages. The earliest evidence of scientific writing in English can be found in the 14th century. 2 With the invention of the printing press around 1450 AD, widespread dissemination of knowledge became a reality and by the 18th century two million books were published. 3 Scientific and academic literature was very few and whatever was present was lacking oversight for its authenticity and appropriateness but it all changed in 1660 AD when a group of scientists including Newton, Boyle, Hooke and Oldenburg gathered and laid the foundation of The Royal Society of London which was a platform for exchange of scholarly knowledge. And in 1665 AD the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society was founded, the first scientific journal which published a peer reviewed work. 4 Scientific or academic writing is a multifaceted process demanding simultaneously clear expression of thought, accuracy of report, and importantly, honesty. Scientific writing often comes with the constraints of competing pressures and can be deficient in one or more of the components. Insufficient clarity and lapses in the accuracy are assumed to be unintentional, but these lapses, even unintentional, can have undesirable results. But perhaps most widely recognized unethical and deliberate lapse is plagiarism. Plagiarism is regarded as breach of scientific conduct and publication ethics. 6 Plagiarism is defined as ''appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results or words without giving appropriate credit to the source or author''. 6 In addition to plagiarism which indicates intellectual theft, another form of plagiarism is self-plagiarism in which author presents his previously published work or data as original work''. 7 Countries which previously had a little stake in research activities like China, Pakistan and India are now contributing significantly to research efforts worldwide resultantly, the number of publications has increased many fold from 1.09 million in 2002 to 1.94 million in 2010 8 …