It's a safe bet that Polish chemical engineer Andrzej Jendryczko could have retired quietly from a long research career without facing charges of plagiarism had it not been for the Internet. It was thanks to the Net's remarkable power to link scholars and libraries across continents and to serve up instantaneous comparisons of texts that Jendryczko's accuser, cancer researcher Marek Wroñski of Staten Island University Hospital in New York, was able to unearth a trove of 30 allegedly plagiarized medical papers last year (see main text).
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Eliot Marshall (1998) studied this question.