What to do when you encounter plagiarism

I recently was in for quite a surprise: a paper in my field turned out to contain information I had developed earlier, without the authors giving credit to my work. They had taken an elaborate table of mine which summarizes the state of the art in terms of equations, and added one equation on the bottom. They used a database I developed, published, and made publicly available, and while they referenced in the paper to my database paper, they did not then mention that the database they used was not their own developed database.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m happy to see people continue my work. I’m glad to see my database is useful for others. However, I do think one should give credit where credit is due.

In my case, I wrote the publisher to flag this issue. I’m surprised with all the digital tools we have to check this, it can still happen.

If you are wondering what to do in a case of plagiarism, you can check the committee of ethics in publishing’s requirements here.