Vice-chancellor of university in Pakistan loses paper for plagiarizing from a thesis

Sometimes, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery.

Ask Farukh Iqbal. Earlier this year, Iqbal, of the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at RMIT University, in Melbourne, Australia, was alerted to a recent paper in the journal Fuel that cited a 2020 article he’d written with some colleagues. 

Iqbal read the paper and realized with dismay that not only was his work — which included parts of his thesis — cited, it was plagiarized:

I immediately asked the corresponding and collaborating authors of the paper about it but got a harsh reply in response. Then I wrote to the fuel journal which retracted the paper after a long investigation. 

Compounding the problem, Iqbal said, was the list of authors, which included Muhammad Suleman Tahir, the vice chancellor at Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology in Pakistan.

Iqbal said he first contacted Fuel about the theft in November 2020. The journal retracted the paper in June. Here’s the retraction notice for the article, titled “Fabrication of ZnFe2O4 modified TiO2 hybrid composites for photocatalytic reduction of CO2 into methanol”:

The article plagiarized part of the PhD thesis of Farukh Iqbal, that part of the thesis was subsequently published here: J Chem Technol Biotechnol 2020; 95: 2208–2221 https://doi.org/10.1002/jctb.6408

One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.

(The notice refers to a PhD thesis, but Iqbal said this was his master’s thesis.)

Iqbal told us: 

This story is interesting and different from similar stories because the first author … of the plagiarized paper is a sitting Vice-chancellor of a public university in Pakistan and corresponding authors are heads of their departments. This thing puts a serious concern about research ethics violation by the head of institutes who are supposed to be responsible for the implementation of research integrity in their teaching institutes. It is also points out the abuse of power to steal student’s work and use it for personal benefits.

Tahir did not respond to requests for comment. 

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