Anti-terrorism researcher notches ninth retraction — or does he?

A year ago, we wrote about eight retractions by Nasrullah Memon, an anti-terrorism researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, for plagiarism.

He seems to has another retraction, although that may be in dispute. As Debora Weber-Wulff reports, Memon’s chapter in Advanced Data Mining and Applications, which “constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Advanced Data Mining and Applications, ADMA 2007, held in Harbin, China in August 2007,” is now marked “retracted.”

There’s nothing on the chapter, titled “How Investigative Data Mining Can Help Intelligence Agencies to Discover Dependence of Nodes in Terrorist Networks,” to say why the work is being withdrawn. It has been cited in four other works, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, three of which were co-authored by Memon.

But Memon tells us the paper is not being retracted, only corrected. He forwarded us this email from Springer, which published the book:

Due to some extenuating circumstances, we have decided not to retract this paper after all. However, the fact remains that Table 1 was taken from the paper by R. Popp and J. Poindexter. We would therefore insert an erratum to the paper on SpringerLink, with words to this effect:

“Table 1 of the paper starting on page 430 of this volume was copied, without permission, from the paper “Countering Terrorism through Information and Privacy Protection Technologies” by R. Popp and J. Poindexter, published in Security & Privacy, IEEE (Volume 4, Issue 6), 2006.”

We’ve contacted Springer for clarification, and will update with anything we learn.

Hat tip: Gerhard Hindemith