TITLE: Frequency of papers showing academic misconduct among the articles indexed by MathSciNet and Zentralblatt MATH
QUESTION [31 upvotes]: Among the papers indexed by MathSciNet and Zentralblatt MATH,
I occasionally have seen papers which consist essentially only
of text copied from elsewhere without proper attribution and without
adding any significant value. I would be interested whether anyone
has an idea what the frequency of such papers among those indexed in
the mentioned databases roughly is. --
Are these extremely rare cases, or are such papers more common than one usually thinks, and perhaps even not easy to keep out of the databases if
one doesn't want to be too restrictive in which journals to cover? --
Is there any data known on this?
Also, if one spots such a paper -- should one report this to the
authors or copyright holders of the pieces of text from which the 
paper is composed, to the editorial board of the journal in which 
the paper is published, or to MathSciNet / Zentralblatt MATH --
or rather just ignore it? What is common practice in such case?

REPLY [35 votes]: On behalf of MathSciNet / Mathematical Reviews, I concur with Olaf Teschke that we appreciate notification of such cases.  We too sense that the number of cases has increased.  The majority of the alerts we receive come from our reviewers.  We sometimes have authors contact us to say that their papers have been republished by someone else.  And we do receive a number of notifications from third parties.  
If you wish to notify MathSciNet of such a case, you may write to mrexec@ams.org (as in MR Executive Editor). If you wish to become a reviewer, you may write to us at mathrev@ams.org.  
As with zbMATH, when a case of duplicated text or duplicated papers comes up, we contact the editorial boards of both journals, inform the editors at zbMATH, and add a note to the listing of the paper.  
Edward Dunne, 
Executive Editor, 
Mathematical Reviews