Robot paper retracted for stealing from doctoral thesis

int j adv robot sysThe authors of a paper in the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems have lost it after it became clear that they’d lifted most of it from a PhD thesis.

Here’s the notice:

Retraction to: Novel Control Algorithm for the Foot Placement of a Walking Bipedal Robot. Int J Adv Robot Syst, 2013, 10:202. doi: 10.5772/55909

The Publisher retracts [1] on Authors’ request, following a report of plagiarized content presented in the article. The Publisher’s subsequent investigation of the claims confirmed that the majority of the article originates from Section 4 of Tomas De Boer’s doctoral thesis titled “Foot placement in robotic bipedal locomotion” published in March 2012. Text, equations and figures were appropriated without reference to Dr. De Boer’s thesis or any other indication of the content’s origin.

The Authors regret their actions and extend their sincere apologies to Dr. De Boer and Dr. Martijn Wisse.

Tomas De Boer’s doctoral thesis may be accessed online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.4233/uuid:795fa8f5-84a0-4673-810c-a8265e29791c

The authors — Wanli Liu, Zhankui Wang, and Meng Guo — are at two different institutions in China.

De Boer was a graduate student at the Delft University of Technology, and is now at the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition. Wisse was De Boer’s supervisor, according to the thesis.

InTech, the publisher of the journal, is on Jeffrey Beall’s list of questionable and potentially predatory publishers.

Hat tip: Rolf Degen

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