Note to computer scientists: a publication is not a reconfigurable logic device.
The Journal of Circuits, Systems and Computers has retracted a 2010 article by a pair of Iranian researchers who put the paper together using previously published work that, simply put, they reconfigured for their own purposes.
The article, “Autonomous Group Testing Based Fault Tolerance in Reconfigurable Logic Devices,” was written (ostensibly, at least) by Javad Sababeh and Karim Mohammadi, of Iran University of Science and Technology, in Tehran.
But according to the retraction notice, much of the paper was taken from work by two computer scientists at the University of Central Florida:
It has been found by the authors of the Compliance & University RIO at the University of Central Florida (UCF) on behalf of Robert DeMara [we think it might be Ronald DeMara] and Carthic Sharma that the concerned paper contains original text, tables, and figures from the sources authored or coauthored by the complaintant. The respondent (Javad Sababeh) rebutted with two emails and stated that he had used the complaintant’s ideas and some text in the source papers. After carefully examining the materials provided by both sides, and considering the weight of evidence available and the request of the office Compliance & University RIO at the UCF, we retract this article.
The study has yet to be cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Reblogged this on The Firewall.
This sounds and looks like an electrical engineering article in an obscure journal, but thanks for the heads up nonetheless!
Is there any followup with retractions, in computer science or in other disciplines? I mean, isn’t it likely that people who (heavily) plagiarize in one paper likely do so in others as well? And wouldn’t it be much more efficient to target people who plagiarize instead of letting them submit the next and the next and the next plagiarized paper …
It probably would be better for science and the behavior of other scientists in that discipline as well … something like a plagiarism wiki where works of identified plagiarists are displayed for public scrutiny … not as a punishment ‘wall of shame’, but to either a) show that this was a one-time ‘mistake’ or b) to find other plagiarized works and remove them as well …
The main story here *should* be that this university in Florida has a department which handles cases like this. Kudos to them!