I spent much of the morning being livid, after stumbling on a paper. First, some background: In 2012, I published a paper in Nature Methods that introduced and described a new algorithm for rapidly and accurately determining the location of particles in images — something that’s very important to super-resolution microscopy, measuring fluid properties using tracer particles, finding stars in the sky, etc. I spent innumerable hours meditatively focusing on inventing an approach that is faster and better than existing methods, wandering lots of dead ends before finally coming up with the insight of a symmetry-based algorithm. It was an intense, and tiring process, and it led to the following paper. Note the title, and this subset of the figures:
Link to the full paper: http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v9/n7/abs/nmeth.2071.html
This morning I found a paper that flagrantly rips off mine, with nearly the same title,method, figures, and even idiosyncrasies of analysis (how signal strength is plotted, what comparator methods are used, …). Here it is:
Link to the full paper: http://www.opticsinfobase.org/ol/abstract.cfm?uri=ol-37-13-2481
This paper was published shortly after mine, and was submitted before mine was published. I suppose it’s possible, though astronomically unlikely, that it was conceived independently. If not: how could the authors have found and lifted my (unpublished) work? I shared drafts of the paper widely — which was very useful in getting feedback and devising rigorous tests — and also presented on it at two conferences that occurred before these people’s paper’s submission date. The conferences are perhaps likely causes — the offending paper reads like an inexact and sloppy imitation of what I covered better in the discussion in my paper — it more echoes the way I presented it at meetings.
I’ve written to Optics Letters, and am awaiting a response.
So is the moral of this story to only present complete, published work?! That would be terrible, of course — one would lose the advantage of honing one’s thoughts through feedback and interactions, and conferences would become pointless repetitions of things we could already read. I don’t have great thoughts; perhaps I’ll write more later.
The Eighteenth Elephant 
Small comfort for this outrage, but I do think there must be a separate circle of Hell for flagrant plagiarists where they have to witness their most precious belongings being stollen from them again and again.
Wow! This is almost unbelievable. I hope there are some serious consequences for these evil thiefs. This is really sad…
People do have to be really careful of thier work. I had to drop a course because someone I was helping stole a substantial amount of my work, just stepping out of the room never to return, and he turned it in as his own. It happened to my husband during a group project in his final semester of his PhD…everyone submitted thier part to one of the group members, a married woman that we had socialized with, and she just disappeared…they all had to take an Incomplete for the course. Perhaps documenting lectures, having lecture schedules signed by heads of department or something would give evidence of your work preceding thiers. Throughout history, you often see discoveries happening at the same time…it makes one wonder whether there was copying afoot, or whether previous events led tpeople in the same direction. Tesla knew that Marconi patented many of his inventions.