In science nothing is worse (well, few things are worse) than seeing your hardwork being copied wholesale without attribution. As educators we look for this … and take harsh actions against our students who cheat. As scientists, its harder to come up with a solution. While looking at some books on microbial phenotypes recently I noticed this piece of plagiarism between Bergeys Manual of Determinitive Bacteriology and Mehrotra And Sumbali’s Principles of Microbiology. I don’t know who copied from who (if it was a class I would fail them both!), but someone is taking the easy way out.

Parts of Bergey’s manual are online through Amazon’s web site, and I was reading page 476 of volume 1 about Cyanobacteria. Its cool, there are storage compartments and inclusions where Cyanobacteria put stuff.

Here’s the link to Amazon’s copy of Bergeys. You may need to click on the look inside and then scroll to p. 476 (it isn’t very far down because they only have a few pages).

In case that doesn’t work for you, here is a screen capture of it:

You can see that Bergeys’ says things like “Most cyanobacteria possess upright hemidiscoidal or hemispherical phycobilisomes, which are complex protein-pigment aggregations arranged in orderly rows on both surfaces of the thylakoids”. and “The phycobilisome is the major light-harvesting complex of most cyanobacteria”.

Here’s a copy of Principles of Microbiology on Google Books.

In case that doesn’t work for you, here is a screen capture of it:

You can see that Principles of Microbiology says things like “Most cyanobacteria possess upright hemidiscoidal or hemispherical phycobilisomes, which are complex protein-pigment aggregates arranged in orderly rows on both surfaces of the thylakoids”. and “The phycobilisome is the major light-harvesting complex of most cyanobacteria”.

Oh, and those lists look the same to me (no, changing a list from 1-5 to a-e or vice-versa does not mean you are not copying).

Hmmmm.