A journal has retracted a paper about augmented reality that it termed “problematic,” as it copied large sections from another paper.
The International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR) is on librarian Jeffrey Beall’s list of “potential, possible, or probable predatory” scholarly journals — which rarely issue retractions, Beall told us.
Contrary to the retraction guidelines published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), IJSR has removed the paper entirely from its website, and asked readers to report any additional copies so they can be removed, as well.
Here’s the retraction notice entitled, “Letter of Apology and Retraction:”
It has come to our attention that article titled “A Personalized Mobile Augmented Reality Framework for Museum Visualization” authored by “Challa Sai Sravanthi, Gunna Kishore” published in “Volume 4 Issue 12, December 2015” of International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR) was flagged as problematic and published paper indeed contains large portions of wording and sections copied from another article titled “A service-oriented mobile augmented reality architecture for personalized museum environments”, authored by “Rattanarungrot, S. , White, M.” published at;
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/abstractAuthors.jsp?reload=true&tp=&arnumber=713669 5&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber% 3D7136695
We International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR) on behalf of all the concerned persons, apologize to the national and international research community for accepting and publishing an article which had several plagiarism issues.
Thus this article is removed from our Web pages and Databases making it inaccessible from our website.
If anyone of you finds any references to this article anywhere on the Internet then kindly report us at [email protected], we assure you that we will take necessary action to remove them as well.
The journal is not indexed by Thomson Reuters Web of Science.
Beall, who is based at the University of Colorado in Denver, told us this is a rare move:
The proportion of articles [predatory publishers] retract to the proportion they should retract is miniscule. Generally, predatory publishers only retract papers when there is some sort of public pressure, such as a blog post identifying plagiarism or obvious pseudoscience in a published paper.
Beall told us he didn’t know if the journal received public pressure to retract the paper in this case, but he learned of the retraction from one of the authors of the paper that was plagiarized, who posted a comment on an article Beall wrote about the journal’s publisher, The Global Journals.
A spokesperson from IJSR told us:
Article was retracted because we received complaint against it with enough evidence…
The IJSR spokesperson explained why the paper was removed entirely from the site:
We have all the copies of removed articles with due reason and evidence, we do our work our way. At least we have some methods to work, unlike other journals.
Because the paper was removed completely, we couldn’t find the contact details or institution affiliations for the paper’s authors, Challa Sai Sravanthi and Gunna Kishore.
We have, however, reached out to Sasithorn Rattanarungrot and Martin White, authors of the paper that the IJSR paper allegedly copied text from, who are based at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. We’ll update the post with anything else we learn.
Hat tip: Jeffrey Beall
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Inspired by this post, I did a quick check of some other recent IJSR papers. I reported one with evidence of plagiarism and it’s now been retracted (not removed entirely). From report to retraction was less than 4 days which is pretty quick.