Researchers from Nepal who had two papers retracted last year for plagiarism will face sanctions, according to a local media report.
According to coverage last month from Republica, a news outlet in Nepal, the editor of Bali Medical Journal said he will blacklist the six authors. In a follow-up article, Dipak Shrestha, associate dean of Kathmandu University in Dhulikhel, Nepal, said the university plans to fire the four doctors who work there. (We contacted the journal and the university to confirm that the researchers have been blacklisted and fired, but have not heard back.)
Here’s the retraction notice for the 2013 paper, “Dyslipidemia in Type-2 Diabetes Mellitus Patients in Western of Nepal: A Hospital Based Study:”
We found that the authors copied most of the data from: DOI:10.4103/1596-3519.87045 (2011)
Here is the detailed explanation: Details
In BaliMedJ earlier year (2012 to 2013), our old Journal Manager didn’t have the experience to manage an International Journal. And without any source of funding, it is impossible to have the application that we used today (Turnitin, Grammarly, CrossMark, etc)
But since 2014, BaliMedJ is taken over by a new managerial team. And all the submission, review, editing, and galley publication were rebuilt. All the old staff was replaced, even BaliMedJ logo changed in 2016. Turnitin is now a mandatory used as a plagiarism check.
Once again, we are terribly and deeply sorry for the mistakes. We will personally check all other old galleys for plagiarism issues.
Bali Medical Journal has not been indexed by Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, which we typically use to determine how often a paper has been cited. The 2013 paper was retracted in November 2017. The notice for the other retracted paper, published in 2014 and retracted this past October, explains that the authors plagiarized from this 2011 paper and describes various other errors.
A middle author on both papers, Naval Kishor Yadav, had a 2013 paper retracted from the Journal of Clinical & Diagnostic Research in 2015, which also cites plagiarism. We contacted Yadav as well as Mukesh Kumar Shrewastwa, corresponding author on the Bali Medical Journal papers, both of whom work at Kathmandu University. Neither has responded to a request for comment.
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