Patterns of (Apparent) Plagiarism

Lately I've been investigating (apparent) plagiarism in various areas of scientific publication. It's quite interesting how many different ways there are to put together an unoriginal paper. No two cases are alike, but I have noticed some patterns. The illustrations here are all real cases I'm working on. I have disguised the text, for now, but all will be revealed soon. The first pattern is the "1-2-3-4" - a straightforward kind of (apparent) plagiarism: large chunks are taken verbatim from sources. One source follows the other with at most a few original words to hold them together. In this example, every color represents a different source paper: