[dfan]

Another recent discovery of plagiarism in the classical music world: https://www.unsungcomposers.com/forum/index.php/topic,6910.0...

(No one has written up an article about Franke to my knowledge, so if you're curious you'll have to read through the thread. It's interesting to see the investigation occur in real time, though.)

[zik]

It's amazing how one person identifies a case where he copied a symphony and then within hours people have found several other cases.

[jhbadger]

This thing happens a lot in other fields. For example, once a scientist is discovered to have committed fraud by manipulating a photograph of results in a paper, people immediately start looking at their other papers and find other examples as it is very unlikely that someone will do this only once.

[Ekaros]

In general it seems regular pattern in fraud. All sorts and specially financial. Things start small and then they are either repeated or grown in scale and eventually are caught. There is probably lot of one time fraud that does not get caught. But serial cases are the pattern when caught.

[gwern]

This is common in cases of plagiarism, fabulists, & serial fabricators: "there's never just one cockroach in the kitchen". The same way Elisabeth Bik will spot one falsified image in a scientific paper and then immediately flag another dozen papers by the same author.

Once you start looking with the assumption of bad faith, the problems often jump out. Before that, no one wants to look, and there's preference falsification and silence. It's likely that some people noticed both of those before, but decided not to die on that hill. Similar to how apparently quite a few Democrats had noticed Joe Biden's decline over the past year, and concerning incidents back at least 5 years, but kept silent until it became safe to leak to journalists or go on the record once everyone else was too.

So, when you don't see clusters exposed, and people getting away with the usual excuses like 'it was just an isolated incident, a single misjudgment', you know they are still there - that just means that they are going undetected. Many fabricators similar to Francesca Gino or Dan Ariely have gotten away with it because 'oh no, the original data was lost / proprietary / confidential / mere summary', and it's just not possible after the fact to find the smoking gun, rather than some acrid smoke and an empty shell casing, which could have been dropped by anyone. (This is why 'plagiarism' is such an effective audit and the DNA testing of academia: because a plagiarist is probably doing those other things too, but you can't prove that as easily as you can 'this paragraph is identical to a previously published paragraph but there was no citation to it'.)

[pclmulqdq]

Classical musicians train for decades to develop good musical memory and the ability to audiate scores (read them and hear what they should sound like). Combine that with the fact that the crowd that likes new music is highly-educated and tight-knit and it's no surprise.

The same goes for professors who spend decades learning to understand experiments who can sniff out bullshit in papers.