Five plagiarism retractions appear for Taiwan engineer

Two journals have retracted five papers by a researcher in Taiwan who evidently took the notion of teamwork a little too liberally.

The first notice is one we missed when it came out in 2012 in the British Journal of Educational Technology. The article, “Learning in troubleshooting of automotive braking system: a project-based teamwork approach,” was written by Janus Liang, of the Yung-Ta Institute of Technology and Commerce in Taiwan. It has yet to be cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

According to the notice:

The following article from British Journal of Educational Technology, ‘Learning in troubleshooting of automotive braking system: A project-based teamwork approach’, by Janus S. Liang, first published online in Wiley OnlineLibrary (http://www.wileyonlinelibrary.com) on 15 April 2011, has been retracted by agreement between the author, the journal Editor, Nick Rushby, and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. The retraction has been agreed due to the inclusion of significant passages of unattributed material from other authors.

Reference

Liang, Janus S. (2012). Learning in troubleshooting of automotive braking system: A project-based teamwork approach, British Journal of Educational Technology, 43, 2, 331–352. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8535.2011.01182.x

We hereby nominate the construction “inclusion of significant passages of unattributed material from other authors” for the prize of most-extra-syllables-used-to-say-the-word-plagiarism, by a count of 26 to 4!

Here is the second notice, from the International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing:

We, the Editors and Publishers of International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, are retracting the following articles:

Janus S. Liang, ‘Development of a knowledge-based assisted product design system’, International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing (2013): http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0951192X.2012.749536

Janus S. Liang, ‘An ontology-based method for the development of a troubleshooting configuration system’, International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, Vol. 25, No. 2, (2012) pp. 189–210: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0951192X.2011.620008

Janus S. Liang, ‘A web-based collaborative design architecture for developing immersive VR driving platform’, International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, Vol. 23, No. 10, (2010) pp. 876–892: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0951192X.2010.490276

Janus S. Liang, ‘Development for a web-based EDM laboratory in manufacturing engineering’, International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, Vol. 22, No. 2, (2009) pp. 83–99: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09511920801911019

Following on from our investigation into the publication of the above articles we have concluded there are significant levels of similarity within the four papers to other identified publications. These papers were not correctly attributed to the authors at the time of publication and the duplication is too significant for the scholarly record to be rectified by other means.

These actions constitute a breach of warranties made by the author with respect to originality. We note we received, peer-reviewed, accepted, and published the article in good faith based on these warranties, and censure this action.

The retracted articles will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as RETRACTED.

The fourth of those papers has been cited three times.

We predict we haven’t heard the last about Liang’s retractions. We found two recent articles with strongly similar abstracts that, should their editors bother to take a look, may well fall because they’re duplicates. Consider:

“A troubleshooting process planning using knowledge base and distributed database approach,” from the May 2011 issue of International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology. Its abstract:

This study introduces an approach of knowledge acquisition and modeling for troubleshooting process planning. It is essential for constructing a knowledge base can be maintained and shared. A knowledge base should not merely be a set of rules but a framework of troubleshooting that can be controlled and customized by rules. For the construction of a knowledge base, identifying the types of knowledge components to be included is a prerequisite. To identify the knowledge units, this study employs a modeling approach consisting of three sub-models: object model, functional model, and dynamic model. In addition, mechanisms for maintaining dependency relations of the troubleshooting descriptions at different locations and reasoning using the knowledge at different locations are also developed. The system is implemented using an object oriented programming language. The proposed approaches are applied to the troubleshooting process planning in automotive braking system.

And, “The methodology of knowledge acquisition and modeling for troubleshooting in automotive braking system,” a February 2012 paper in Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing:

This study introduces a methodology of knowledge acquisition and modeling for troubleshooting in automotive braking system. It is essential for constructing a knowledge base that can be maintained and shared. A knowledge base should not merely be a set of rules, but a framework of troubleshooting that can be controlled and customized by rules. For the construction of a knowledge base, identifying the types of knowledge components to be included is a prerequisite. To identify the knowledge components, this study employs a modeling methodology consisting of three sub-models: instance model, functional model and dynamic model. In addition, mechanisms for maintaining dependency relations of the troubleshooting descriptions at different locations and reasoning using the knowledge at different locations are also developed. The system is implemented using an object-oriented programming language. The proposed methodology is applied to the troubleshooting in automotive braking system.