A group engineers from Iran and Singapore have been forced to retract a paper in the Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials after the article was found to contain incidents of plagiarism.
The article, “Magnetic properties of iron-based soft magnetic composites with MgO coating obtained by sol–gel method,” appeared in April 2010. Sometime later (we’re getting near the three-year mark from the date of publication) it seems, the journal learned that something was amiss with the paper.
As the notice explains:
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.
The authors have plagiarized part of a paper that had already appeared in “Properties of Soft magnetic composite with Evaporated MgO Insulation Coating for low Iron Loss” authored by G. Uozumi et al., published in Mater. Sci. Forum, 534–536 (2007) 1361–1364, http://dx.doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/MSF.534-536.1361.
One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.
The now-retracted paper has been cited 13 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, while the Materials Science Forum version has been cited seven.
We tried to reach the editor of JMMM and will update this post if we learn more.
The paper went south.
“The now-retracted paper has been cited 13 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, while the Materials Science Forum version has been cited seven.” – somebody plagiarizes your three-year old paper and within three more years clocks up twice as many citations as you. Another proof that life is not fair. If they plagiarize they probably also self-cite ad nauseam.
Self-citation is not the explanation for the difference, I found only a few self-citations. One reaons may be that JMMM is mode widely accessible than MSF, the former being published by Elsevier and the latter by TPP. For example, I can’t get full text access to any of TPP’s journals.
So, who pointed out the ‘error’?