A professor of criminology at Middlesex University London has had four papers retracted because at least three of them cribbed significantly from a PhD thesis written by someone named Kribbe.
Three of the four retractions for the professor, Anthony Amatrudo, appear in International Journal of Law in Context. One of the notices reads:
It has been brought to our attention that the above article (Amatrudo, D. (2012)) reuses sections of Hans Kribbe, Corporate Personality: A Political Theory of Association (2003) without permission or acknowledgement and has therefore been retracted. The author acknowledges this with regret.
The fourth paper appeared in The Heythrop Journal. Its notice reads:
The following article from the Heythrop Journal, ‘Understanding Subject(s): The Self as Corporation’ by A. Amutrado, published online on 15 January 2008 in Wiley Online Library (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com), has been retracted by agreement between the Journal Editor in Chief, Dr Patrick Madigan, and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The Retraction has been agreed due to the identification of large amount of plagiarised content present in the article.
None of the papers has been cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
Amatrudo, editor of the forthcoming book “Social Censure and Critical Criminology: After Sumner,” has not responded to requests for comment from Retraction Watch.
A spokesperson for Middlesex University tells Retraction Watch:
Middlesex University is committed to research integrity and we have robust procedures in place to combat academic misconduct. Having been made aware of this issue the University is now following its internal procedures to explore the matter further.
‘Easy pickings’
Kribbe, now at consulting firm GPLUS, tells Retraction Watch that he and Amatrudo were at the London School of Economics (LSE) at the same time, working on their theses, but rarely spoke:
I guess he must have known I since left the academic world altogether to pursue other things, so he was unlikely to ever get caught. Easy pickings.
He basically took entire thesis chapters and published them ad verbatim under his own name. One footnote he added says he presented that particular article also at conferences and seminars!
I had no idea of all this, nor would I probably have ever found out. At the time when I was done with the thesis, I felt more work and refinement was needed for it to be published somewhere decent. I could half see how that might be possible, but I decided to leave it for later, or maybe never, as by then I had taken a government job.
I suppose Tony must have been a too cavalier in the end (one seminar or conference presentation too many) and someone – God knows who – traced the texts back to a dusty library somewhere in London, though the LSE later made the thesis available on the web as well. Which is what must have done him in.
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