We’ve been alerted to a third retracted paper, and a retracted book chapter, for Stefano Ramello, a self-styled “independent researcher” into sexual identity.
Turns out there wasn’t so much independence after all.
The article, “Same sex acts involving older men. An ethnographic study,” had appeared in the April 2013 issue of the Journal of Aging Studies. According to the retraction notice:
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and Author.
The authors have plagiarized part of a paper that had already appeared in Sociological Theory, 2008 26:25, DOI: http://dx.doiorg/10.1111/j.1467-9558.2008.00317.x.
The notice gives a little bio note for Ramello:
Currently, as independent researcher, his study explores the interactions between space, erotic practices, identity, gender and sexuality.
Adam Isaiah Green, of the University of Toronto, wrote the 2008 article, “The Social Organization of Desire: The Sexual Fields Approach,” from which Ramello, Green said:
lifted whole sentences and respondents’ quotes…
Green told us he was alerted to Ramello’s paper when
the editor of the journal in which my article was originally published was contacted by someone over at the journal in which the plagiarized article had been published. … If nothing else, he certainly has some chutzpah!
Ramello also has lost a chapter he’d “written” in the second edition of “Desire, Performance and Classification,” which touted
a fresh and unique approach to the erotic and, in its own way, tries to answer the question, ‘What is erotic?’
Here’s the retraction notice:
After investigation, it has been determined that the chapter titled, ‘Exotic Same Sex Acts between Men: Eroticism in a Public Park in Northern Italy’, by Stefano Ramello, originally published in March 2013 in the edited volume, Desire, Performance, and Classification: Critical Perspectives on the Erotic, is not the author’s original material. This material was presented, with minor textual variations, based upon an article originally presented by Els De Vos, ‘Public Parks in Ghent’s City Life. From Expression to Emancipation?’, in the journal European Planning Studies 7 (2005): 1035-1061, published by Taylor & Francis Group.
We’re guessing this won’t be the last we’ll hear about Ramello. Consider: He’s listed as the editor of a 2011 volume titled “Fascination of Queer,” for which he has written the introduction and a chapter (on gay sex among Italian men). We plucked, basically at random, the following passage from the intro:
As queer is unaligned with any specific identity category, it has the potential to be annexed profitably to any number of discussions. In the history of disciplinary formations, lesbian and gay studies is itself a relatively recent construction, and queer theory can be seen as its latest institutional transformation.
That might sound familiar to one Annamarie Jagose, who wrote in his 1996 article Queer Theory, published by the Australian Humanities Review:
As queer is unaligned with any specific identity category, it has the potential to be annexed profitably to any number of discussions. In the history of disciplinary formations, lesbian and gay studies is itself a relatively recent construction, and queer theory can be seen as its latest institutional transformation.
In an Introduction to a book entitled Fascination of Queer (published in 2011), Mr Ramello wrote the following:
Queer theory opens up possibilities for human relations by producing and/or noticing other ways of living and thinking. The least known and represented forms of desire may produce new and different forms of identity, community and social relations…
That is taken verbatim from Chapter 9 in Research Methods in the Social Sciences. The chapter was written by G. Filax et al and published in 2005 (page 83).
Later in the same book Ramello writes: Queer, then, is an identity category that has no interest in consolidating or even stabilizing itself.
Typed that bad boy into Google and found it is passage written by Annamarie Jagose, and that it has been quoted by at least three previous authors in at least three previous books.
A conclusion then: the only original words written by Ramello in any publication is his first and last names.
I´m still a little bit confuse about what is the threshold to consider that a paper has been plagiarized. Based on what I´m reading at RW, it probably depends on the context, right?
In the case of “salami slicing”, it is expectable to find a considerable level of autoplagiarism. However this level is probably not to high to say that the authors are commiting autoplagiarism, specially because the authors are concient of what they are doing. My question, do the publishers/editors take into account these subliminar levels of autoplagiarism when there is clear evidence of “salami slicing”?
For example, check the two articles below:
A) http://www.ejso.com/article/S0748-7983(13)00256-4/abstract (accepted February 2013)
B) http://www.ejso.com/article/S0748-7983(13)00295-3/abstract (accepted March 2013)
I do not understand why the editors of EJSO did not suggest to publish one article instead of two? Specially because the first half of both articles are rather similar (with verbatim parts) and the structure of the paper is the same. Both articles were at the revision process at probably the same time.
As the two papers are intimately related (the exactly same cases were studied to address related questions), won´t it be necessary a citation/reference to the first published paper?
Because I have never used a plagiarism detection software and I´m not interested to pay for ithenticate at the moment, can anyone please check the degree of “similarities” among the two articles for me?