We have poked fun at Pattern Recognition Letters before for failing to catch blatant plagiarism. We probably should have held off on those jokes for this post.
A group of IT researchers from India has suffered the retraction of a paper in PRL for heavily basing the piece on at least four previous papers written by one of the co-authors without proper attribution (not that such attribution likely would have absolved the sin).
The paper, titled “A robust kernelized intuitionistic fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm in segmentation of noisy medical images,” was published in January of this year by Prabhjot Kaur and colleagues.
Here’s the retraction notice:
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.
It has come to the attention of the Editors-in-Chief of Pattern Recognition Letters that this paper has considerable overlap with the articles listed below. The source materials are not referenced in the current work. In addition, the Pattern Recognition Letters publication cannot be termed as an extension of the articles authored or co-authored by P. Kaur. The Editors have, therefore, decided to retract the article.
1. Kernelized type-2 fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm in segmentation of noisy medical images, Recent Advances in Intelligent Computational Systems (RAICS), 2011 IEEE (P. Kaur) (http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/RAICS.2011.6069361)
2. Robust Intuitionistic Fuzzy C-means clustering for linearly and nonlinearly separable data. In: Internat. Conf. on Image Information Processing (ICIIP), 2011 (P. Kaur)(http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICIIP.2011.6108908)
3. A new Kernelized hybrid c-mean clustering model with optimized parameters, Appl. Soft Comput. 10(2) March 2010, pp. 381–389 (Meena Tushir, Smriti Srivastava)(http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.asoc.2009.08.020)
4. Novel Intuitionistic fuzzy c-means clustering for linearly and Non-linearly separable data. WSEAS Trans. Comput. 11(3) March 2012 (Prabhjot Kaur, A. K. Soni, Anjana Gosain)