copyright infringment?

[kdburton]

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This question may sound stupid, but... I'm doing a literature review and I've been searching all over and coming up with piles of articles that I want to use, and I recently came across one systematic review that essentially sums up all of the information (in an easy to read table) that I need for a portion of the article that I'm writing. I had actually been making a table that is almost identical to it in my article already, but this one includes a lot of studies that I previously hadn't found (in addition to every study that I already included in mine). As long as I cite all the original sources in the bibliography of my article am I infringing on any sort of copyright by essentially having all of this same information summarized in my table? None of the information in the table I'm looking at is this author's own work, they just put the results of a bunch of studies in their paper. It seems as though any two articles I've read on a given subject start out with the some form of the same facts that came from the same papers in the past, so it makes me feel that if I'm essentially doing the same thing at a later part in my article I'm not a bad guy haha

 

[Law2Doc]

This question may sound stupid, but... I'm doing a literature review and I've been searching all over and coming up with piles of articles that I want to use, and I recently came across one systematic review that essentially sums up all of the information (in an easy to read table) that I need for a portion of the article that I'm writing. I had actually been making a table that is almost identical to it in my article already, but this one includes a lot of studies that I previously hadn't found (in addition to every study that I already included in mine). As long as I cite all the original sources in the bibliography of my article am I infringing on any sort of copyright by essentially having all of this same information summarized in my table? None of the information in the table I'm looking at is this author's own work, they just put the results of a bunch of studies in their paper. It seems as though any two articles I've read on a given subject start out with the some form of the same facts that came from the same papers in the past, so it makes me feel that if I'm essentially doing the same thing at a later part in my article I'm not a bad guy haha

If you are summarizing essentially the same information in the same way, you need to cite this author or you are committing plagiarism.

 

[pincheeric]

If you are summarizing what is already written in another article, why are you even writing the article. Sounds like someone else beat you to the punch.

 

[yaah]

Generally if you are writing an article/book chapter and you use something directly from another source (like a table or image) you can get permission from the publisher (probably also involving the original author). Then the figure/table will appear with "reproduced/modified from fig 1 in (insert citation here).

If the table is not anything special and you create your own version it may be ok. It would sort of depend on the contents and layout. If the table just had different columns summarizing different results from other papers, it's probably ok if you just make your own table and cite where all the data came from.

If you do it without going through this that is bad. The best advice would be to consult someone personally who has significant experience in publications.

 

[lexrageorge]

If you had already created your own table, and came across the one you just discovered, but decide to include your original, unmodified version of your table, technically there is no need to cite. However, it would probably be a good idea to include one.

If you do copy the table, you definitely need to cite the author's work, or, as has already been stated, you would be comitting plagiarism. No need to get copyright permission; such use would definitely fall under "fair use" guidelines.

 

[kdburton]

If you are summarizing what is already written in another article, why are you even writing the article. Sounds like someone else beat you to the punch.

Only part of my article includes this information and it is actually used to make a different and very specific point that is not the same as the previous author. So he may have beat me to the punch in terms of finding useful information, but hes using it for something totally different.

 

[kdburton]

Generally if you are writing an article/book chapter and you use something directly from another source (like a table or image) you can get permission from the publisher (probably also involving the original author). Then the figure/table will appear with "reproduced/modified from fig 1 in (insert citation here).

If the table is not anything special and you create your own version it may be ok. It would sort of depend on the contents and layout. If the table just had different columns summarizing different results from other papers, it's probably ok if you just make your own table and cite where all the data came from.

If you do it without going through this that is bad. The best advice would be to consult someone personally who has significant experience in publications.

Well the content is essentially the same. There are multiple ways (4) of performing a certain test and there has been continued debate of which method is best in the specific disease process I'm looking at. For part of my article I'm essentially reviewing a bunch of studies, from each method, and reporting the results in terms of sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value and overall accuracy in a table format. Before I even saw this systematic review I had constructed my table in the same format, but when I DID find it I noticed that there were some studies that I never found in the first place and I want to include them in my review to give a more complete picture. So its a fairly generic table that I'm planning on using in my article and I plan to cite all of the original author's (all of those who published their sens, specif, PPV, NPV, accuracy) work, but I'm just curious if I need to somehow cite the work of the author who did this review since my table is so similar? Keep in mind that none of the individual study results are his/her own work, he/she just put the results into a nice table

 

[ACSurgeon]

This question may sound stupid, but... I'm doing a literature review and I've been searching all over and coming up with piles of articles that I want to use, and I recently came across one systematic review that essentially sums up all of the information (in an easy to read table) that I need for a portion of the article that I'm writing. I had actually been making a table that is almost identical to it in my article already, but this one includes a lot of studies that I previously hadn't found (in addition to every study that I already included in mine). As long as I cite all the original sources in the bibliography of my article am I infringing on any sort of copyright by essentially having all of this same information summarized in my table? None of the information in the table I'm looking at is this author's own work, they just put the results of a bunch of studies in their paper. It seems as though any two articles I've read on a given subject start out with the some form of the same facts that came from the same papers in the past, so it makes me feel that if I'm essentially doing the same thing at a later part in my article I'm not a bad guy haha

Just curious... Don't you have to specify which key words/phrases you will use in your search? Specify a date range? I thought lit reviews were supposed to be very systematic, so if you hadn't found these studies using your "system" can you even use them?

I guess if your system includes using the bibliography as a source for finding more articles, then I guess that would be fine.

 

[kdburton]

Just curious... Don't you have to specify which key words/phrases you will use in your search? Specify a date range? I thought lit reviews were supposed to be very systematic, so if you hadn't found these studies using your "system" can you even use them?

I guess if your system includes using the bibliography as a source for finding more articles, then I guess that would be fine.

Not all reviews specify words/phrases used for searches and date ranges. I may, however, specify that I'm using articles published within a certain date range and throw out some of the older ones. Using Ovid SP and the same search criteria that some of the reviews I've read used I was unable to come up with a lot of the results that they supposedly found anyways. I'm convinced that some authors fudge that section of their article, because the people classifying the articles in the database aren't the authors of the article and they are limited in the number of keywords that they can classify it under. So while two articles may be getting to same exact point with the same results and general discussion, they may not come up under the same keyword search. And, yes, it is common for people doing reviews to use the bibliographies of articles that have come up in their searches as a means to broaden the number of sources they have for their review as well.