When Nicholas Peppas, chair of engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, discovered one of his papers had been plagiarized, he decided to “go public!”
On February 27, Peppas tweeted about a “gross case of plagiarism:” He alleged a 2013 review published in Saudi Pharmaceutical Journal had directly copied sections of his 2011 review in Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews—both published by Elsevier. (The tweet includes a side-by-side image of a section of the two texts.)
GROSS CASE OF PLAGIARISM. What do you do when you discover that major sections of a 2016 paper by R Jivani et al https://t.co/yMQJ55pf7C (e.g., Sections 4.1 & 4.2 ) are directly copied from your 2013 paper in ADDR https://t.co/wHrlvsyMKB (same 4.1 & 4.2 sections)? You go public! pic.twitter.com/l2XzRynbHz
— Nicholas A. Peppas (@NPeppas) February 28, 2018
Peppas’s 2011 paper “Microfabrication technologies for oral drug delivery” has been cited 50 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The 2013 paper, which references the Peppas review in several sections, has been cited seven times.
We reached out to Elsevier to ask how the plagiarism was missed during peer review. A spokesperson explained:
Crosscheck wasn’t available to this journal in our editorial system at the time, and [the] editor will be taking all necessary measures in accordance with [Committee on Publication Ethics]’s procedures.
CrossCheck is a service that lets publishers scan papers for plagiarism. It was developed in 2008.
Peppas told Retraction Watch that a professor had contacted him and the other senior author Ali Khademhosseini, a professor of bioengineering at University of California, Los Angeles, on February 27, after one of her graduate students had discovered the plagiarism.
Peppas said that he felt disgust when he found out:
A wonderful review paper from Harvard and [University of Texas] was copied word by word. Of course I do not mind it if other researchers cite our work properly. But this was an outright copying of 20-line paragraphs…
Peppas noted that he has not yet contacted Rishad R. Jivani, corresponding author of the 2013 review. We reached out to Jivani, who is based at C. U. Shah College of Pharmacy & Research in Gujarat, India, but did not hear back.
Peppas told us he decided to tweet about the situation:
… to stress once more that plagiarism is unacceptable.
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I’m a freelance editor of papers written by authors for whom english is a second language. I don’t have all the fancy-schmancy software like iThenticate at my disposal. It’s not hard to find plagiarism. When halting English suddenly starts including idioms like “shortcomings” and “hallmark,” all you need to do is plug it into Google Scholar and voila! One and often several other articles (indicating levels of plagiarism) come up. If the author’s first language is English, it’s obviously more difficult.
Asking as someone who used to do a little of that sort of work, what do you do when you find plagiarism?
I didn’t capitalize “English” in my first sentence. Not enough coffee.