Time to roll out the irony meter again.
A group of scientists from Uttar Pradesh, India, who study forensic bioinformatics have had a paper retracted for something that can generally be detected with a specialized form of forensic software: Plagiarism.
Here’s the notice for Kumar Ajay, Singh Neetu, Gaurav S.S. “Forensic Bioinformatics: An innovative technological advancement in the field of Forensic Medicine and Diagnosis,” signed by O.A. Sofola, editor-in-chief:
The Editors and Publisher of the International Journal of Medicine and Biomedical Research wish to state that the following article has been retracted from the journal: Kumar Ajay, Singh Neetu, Gaurav S.S. Forensic Bioinformatics: An innovative technological advancement in the field of Forensic Medicine and Diagnosis.
Int J Med Biomed Res 2012; 1(1):35-38. This article contains passages from a published article without proper attribution and acknowledgement as if they were original. The passages originally appeared in:
Lucia Bianchi and Pietro Lio’. Forensic DNA and bioinformatics. Briefings in Bioinformatics 2007; 8:(2):117-128. doi:10.1093/bib/bbm006. The corresponding author was contacted and he admitted guilt, however he did not respond to several mails notifying him of the proposed retraction.
International Journal of Medicine and Biomedical Research publishes this in good faith and in accordance with our authors’ guideline regarding publication ethics.
Note that the notice tiptoes around using the word “plagiarism,” which means we have to update the euphemism glossary, too.
We recommend a far greater commitment to openness and transparency and a greater availability of documents to public scrutiny.
We couldn’t agree more.
I am always amazed at these cases in Forensics as supposedly these guys should be providing for the enforcement of the Law and Order. So I think it gets even smuttier when their papers come up with fraudulent contents…
It’s quite a stretch to see this as ironic.