Sometimes plagiarism can be tricky to catch when an article has to be translated before publication.
That seems to be the case for two papers out of a hospital in Canakkale, Turkey, that discussed results of two different kinds of heart surgery.
Here’s the retraction notice for “The effects of 21 and 23 milimeter aortic valve prosthesis on hemodynamic performance and functional capacity in young adults,” in the Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences:
This retracts the article “The effects of 21 and 23 milimeter aortic valve prosthesis on hemodynamic performance and functional capacity in young adults” in Vol. 30 No. 2 from page 356-360, which was published in final edited form because of ethical misconduct as one of the authors copied some portion from an article published in Turkish language which was detected later. The authors have been notified and agree with the retraction. Retracted on April 15, 2014.
And here’s the very similar notice for “Atrial Septal Defect Repair; Our Early and Mid-Phase Results”:
This retracts the article “Atrial septal defect repair; our early and mid-phase results “ in Vol.30 No.2 from page 322-325, which was published in final edited form because of ethical misconduct as one of the authors copied some portion from an article published in Turkish language which was detected later. The authors have been notified and agree with the retraction. Retracted on April 15, 2014.
Author Sedat Ozcan tells Retraction Watch that both articles did contain some plagiarized passages, and stated that he would like to republish the data with the copied passages removed.
Neither paper has been cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Nice. “Yes, I did blatantly steal someone’s work and claim it for my own. And I would have kept it that way but you caught me. So now I’ll just remove the plagiarized passages and republish. ”
Glad to hear that he’s so repentant. I suppose he wants us to assume that his data is valid and not stolen, too.
A mistake was made. The authors were apparently not aware of it. They were repentant, publically, and suggested that their work was valid and important enough for re-publishing while removing the errors related to plagiarism. Perhaps we should be whipping this Pakistani publisher for doing such a sloppy job of not detecting the plagiarism before the paper was published. In other words, I am not sure which is worse: the plagiarizing authors, or the unprofessional journal/publisher. Please observe both sides of any coin.
JATdS, I sincerely hope you were just trying to be funny here. I don’t know of a single plagiarism detection software that also translates the document under investigation to all possible languages in the world and then checks for overlap. They don’t exist, and will likely never exist.
To call the publisher unprofessional for not detecting plagiarised sections that were written in a different language as that of the article is just plain unprofessional, as there are no tools that could have detected this plagiarism. It is very possible the journal and publisher are not very professional, but this is perhaps the worst example ever to use as evidence of that charge.
Copying sentences word-for-word from a paper previously written by someone else, then placing them in another article without attribution to the original source, is by no means a “mistake.” That is a very deliberate and deceitful act. Saying that the authors were unaware of it could only be true if those “authors” did not write, or review, the paper themselves.
It’s a pity that the retraction notices don’t mention which article(s) was/were plagiarised. In fact, given that all the authors are Turkish and the wording of the retraction notice it’s possible that this was a case of duplication, rather than plagiarism. Or did Ozcan confrim to RW that it was indeed someone else’s words which were used?