Sometimes things get pretty meta around here.
Exhibit A: The journal Current Medical Chemistry has retracted a 2012 paper for plagiarizing from a 2011 article — and the senior authors of each article share the same last name.
Ho hum, you say. But that name is one that might be familiar to RW readers.
Here’s the notice:
The article entitled “Phytochemicals from Plants to Combat Cardiovascular Disease”, by Hannah R. Vasan-thi, Nitin ShriShri Mal, Dilip Kumar Das, published in Curr. Med. Chem. 2012; 19(14): 224251. https://www.eurekaselect.com/97287/article has been retracted on a complaint of plagiarism with a previously pub-lished article entitled “Resveratrol in cardiovascular health and disease” in the journal Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences as Ann N Y Acad Sci . 2011 Jan;1215:22-33. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010.05843.x The authors were informed of this complaint and were requested to give justification on the matter, in their de-fence. However, no reply was received from them in this regard. Bentham Science apologizes to the readers of the journal for any inconvenience this may have caused.
About that 2011 paper. The last author is Dipak Das, who in 2012 was found guilty by the University of Connecticut of 145 instances of research misconduct. Das, who died in 2013, lost 20 papers to retraction in the scandal — although not the one from which Dilip Das and colleagues stole text.
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It’s German for “Dipak The”.
Dipak the what ?
Question the RW suggestion that the two Das names on these papers are different persons.
The RW Data Base cites as plagiarism the 2012 Curr Med Chem paper, retracted in 2020, as having the last author named “Dilip Kumar Das”, at the University of Connecticut Health Center (UCHC). Downloading the paper at its website https://www.eurekaselect.com/97287/article (cited in this journal’s retraction notice) shows however that the printed author’s name as simply D.K. Das, at that UCHC address.
The cited 2011 Ann N Y Acad Sci “plagiarized” source paper also shows the last author as D.K. Das at the same UCHC address, when download from its website. https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010.05843.x
. . . . . .
This person, D.K. Das = Dipak Kumar Das, often cited by RW for having 20 retractions, was found by UCHC in 2012 to have committed 145 counts of falsification of data as research misconduct and was fired. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipak_K._Das.
RW reported his death in CT in 2013, http://retractionwatch.com/2013/10/04/dipak-das-dies-at-67/
[ORI had not made findings by then and has not proposed them for any deceased person] [Thus, he could not have responded to any recent letters from Curr Med Chem regarding a proposed 2020 retraction].
[ RW Data Base also lists 3 different 2016 papers with Dilip Kumar Das as author being retracted in 2017 for plagiarism, cited as from T. M. Bhagalpur University in Bhagalpur, India.
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/01/30/plant-biologist-loses-three-papers-made-duplication-ring/ ]