The American Journal of Public Health has retracted a paper after it was published online, when editors discovered that the author had plagiarized text verbatim and attributed the material to completely different sources.
“Child Farm Laborers” discusses child labor through the lens of the American photographers that documented the lives of young farm workers at the beginning of the century, such as Lewis Hine. It was authored Aung Zaw Win, whose affiliation on the paper is listed as Notre Dame de Namur University, in California.
The article was slated to be published in the journal’s August issue but editors printed the retraction shortly after it posted online. Here’s the notice:
Content presented in the paper “Child Farm Laborers” by Aung Zaw Win, which was published in the July 2015 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, was improperly attributed and comprised material published in other copyrighted sources. As a result, we retract this article from the literature.
A spokesperson for the publisher, the American Public Health Association, noted that some of the text had been copied verbatim without proper citation.
In summary, AJPH became aware that sources cited by the author did not match the sources from which the information was derived. For example, text was copied verbatim from one source, but then the author provided a different citation as the source of the originating material.
We’ve contacted the author, and will update with any response.
Hat tip: Kathryn Foxhall
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Surely it would still have been plagiarism had the sources been correctly cited. Just because you cite something, doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to enclose it in quotes, if it is a quote.