I think there are two reasons it’s not more common to retroactively analyze papers and publications for copied or closely-paraphrased segments.
First, it’s not actually easy to automate. Current solutions are RIFE with false-positives and human judgement requirements to make final conclusions.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, nobody really cares, outside of graded work where the organization is basing your credentials on doing original work (but usually not even that, just semi-original presentation of other works).
It would probably be a minor scandal if any significant papers were discovered to be based on uncredited/un-footnoted other work, but unless it were egregious (in which case it probably would have already been noticed), just not that big a deal.
Distinguishing between a properly cited paraphrase and taking someone’s work as your own without sufficient attribution is not trivial even for people. There’s a lot of grey area in terms of how closely you can mimic the original before it becomes problematic (this is largely what I’ve seen Rufo trying to hang the Harvard admin woman with, paraphrases that maintained a lot of the original wording which were nonetheless clearly cited, which at least to me seem like bad practice but not actually plagiarism in the sense it is generally meant) and it comes down to a judgement call in the edge cases.
A professor I know fell afoul of an automated plagiarism detector because it pinged on some of her own previous papers on the same subject, and the journal refused to reconsider. Felt very silly, like they were asking her to go through and arbitrarily change the wording she thought was best just because she had used it before because the computer said so. I think she ultimately ended up submitting to a different journal and it got accepted there.
I think there are two reasons it’s not more common to retroactively analyze papers and publications for copied or closely-paraphrased segments.
First, it’s not actually easy to automate. Current solutions are RIFE with false-positives and human judgement requirements to make final conclusions.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, nobody really cares, outside of graded work where the organization is basing your credentials on doing original work (but usually not even that, just semi-original presentation of other works).
It would probably be a minor scandal if any significant papers were discovered to be based on uncredited/un-footnoted other work, but unless it were egregious (in which case it probably would have already been noticed), just not that big a deal.
Distinguishing between a properly cited paraphrase and taking someone’s work as your own without sufficient attribution is not trivial even for people. There’s a lot of grey area in terms of how closely you can mimic the original before it becomes problematic (this is largely what I’ve seen Rufo trying to hang the Harvard admin woman with, paraphrases that maintained a lot of the original wording which were nonetheless clearly cited, which at least to me seem like bad practice but not actually plagiarism in the sense it is generally meant) and it comes down to a judgement call in the edge cases.
A professor I know fell afoul of an automated plagiarism detector because it pinged on some of her own previous papers on the same subject, and the journal refused to reconsider. Felt very silly, like they were asking her to go through and arbitrarily change the wording she thought was best just because she had used it before because the computer said so. I think she ultimately ended up submitting to a different journal and it got accepted there.