Plagiarism That Is Not

This fascinating continuum-discrete duality in ring current calculations is a fundamental novelty in theoretical chemistry that deserves greater attention and better understanding, which adds to the great significance of this work. After the manuscript was submitted to the Journal of Computational Chemistry, unexpectedly in a letter one of the editors sent the following short report from one of the two anonymous reviewers  

The paper can not be accepted in any journal because of plagiarism. This is evident— 

The above should have sufficed to show not only that our paper was not plagiarism, but that this information was available for the reviewer, who was incompetent and superficial, yet arrogant and irresponsible. Chemists who have not heard of conjugated circuits should not evaluate publications on chemical graph theory whether considering benzenoid or non-benzenoid conjugated hydrocarbons. Period. 

Use of synonyms to cover plagiarism has been known, particularly in social sciences [22]. In mathematics and natural sciences, use of synonyms is not so infrequent as it may offer alternative labels that may have distinct descriptive features. Thus, for example, Clar referred to benzenoid systems having only k electron aromatic sextets and empty rings as the fully benzenoid systems [23]. Polansky and Gutman have referred to the same as the all benzenoid systems [24], and Dias refers to these most stable benzenoids as the total resonant sextet benzenoids [25]. There are no problems with synonyms in chemistry/or informed persons, but uninformed chemists, as was the anonymous referee of our paper on ring currents, can be confused, which is, of course, their problem  

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