Earlier this month, Werther Ramalho, an environmental scientist in Brazil, got some bad news from a colleague: A paper he’d published in 2013 as a postdoctoral researcher had been plagiarized in its entirety.
“They stole years of effort and dedication that I had at the beginning of my career as a scientist! Horrible!” Ramalho, who is currently affiliated with the Instituto Boitatá de Etnobiologia e Conservação da Fauna, told us.
Ramalho’s original paper, “Study on the population structure of the paradoxical frog, Pseudis bolbodactyla (Amphibia: Anura: Hylidae), using natural markings for individual identification,” was published in the journal Zoologia and has been cited three times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The copy, “Study on the Population Structure of the Paradoxical Frog,” was published in 2020 in the Journal of Critical Reviews. The authors are listed as Ravi Prakask Tiwary and Dr. Meenakshi Solanki of Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam University in India. The journal is not indexed in Web of Science or listed on Google Scholar.
The only changes are trivial. Ramalho and colleagues use “Materials and Methods” as a subject heading, for instance, while Tiwary and Solanki say “Research Methodology,” and the original parenthetical citations were removed in the 2020 paper. Pictures and figures are copied in their entirety, too, along with identical captions.
Ramalho wrote an email to Tiwary as the paper’s corresponding author, the editor of the Journal of Critical Reviews, the university listed as Tiwary’s affiliation, the editorial board of Zoologia, and leaders of the journal’s publisher, the Sociedade Brasileira de Zoologia to express his outrage:
I am writing to warn you and to report this crime committed by both the “authors” and the editorial board of this clearly predatory “journal”.
Neither Tiwary nor the Journal of Critical Reviews replied to his demand for retraction. As of today the article remains online, unmarked.
As we’ve reported before, calling out even the most obvious cases of plagiarism does not always lead to action. A couple of Zoologia editors did respond with sympathy, but said there’s not much they could do to force the retraction.
A subject editor, Sionei Ricardo Bonatto, responded first, calling the plagiarism “unacceptable,” and promising that the editors would file official complaints with the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE) and with SCIELO, a publisher of journals in Latin America.
Ricardo Moratelli, the editor-in-chief of Zoologia, also responded and said that if the Journal of Critical Reviews was“minimally serious,” it would retract the article, but he did not think that likely to happen.
After some back-and-forth with SCIELO confirmed that the organization could do nothing to help, Bonatto did some research on what else Ramalho could do if the Journal of Critical Reviews didn’t act on his initial complaint. His advice: Report the copyright infringement to Google, and contact us. He also said Zoologia would do what it could (translated from Portuguese via Google):
We are consulting our Editorial Committee on how we can proceed to give greater weight to your report. We are certain that we will send a letter to the authors’ institution and also to the journal.
Neither the editor of the Journal of Critical Reviews (who is unnamed on their web site, with only a general email address as a contact) nor Tiwary has replied to our requests for comment.
The journal claims to use software to detect plagiarism, and has a plagiarism policy that reads in full:
Whether intentional or not, plagiarism is a serious violation. Plagiarism is the copying of ideas, text, data and other creative work (e.g. tables, figures and graphs) and presenting it as original research without proper citation. We define plagiarism as a case in which a paper reproduces another work with at least 15% similarity and without citation.
If evidence of plagiarism is found before/after acceptance or after publication of the paper, the author will be offered a chance for rebuttal. If the arguments are not found to be satisfactory, the manuscript will be retracted and the author sanctioned from publishing papers for a period to be determined by the responsible Editor(s).
Ironically, the journal has also published a paper on using machine learning for fraud detection, as well as other articles by one of the authors listed on the paper that plagiarized Ramalho on such disparate topics as a clinical trial of cervical cancer screening to beekeeping in Indian villages.
“My only intention is that the Journal of Critical Review that published it make a retraction and withdraw the article from circulation,” Ramalho told us.
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In at least a couple of previous RW posts describing egregious instances of research misconduct, contributor ‘Failed Scientist’ would call for public caning of fraudsters, a response that I often found outrageous and distasteful for the RW forum. Well, I admit that I was so incensed when I read this post, that an image of a caning of these perpetrators flashed through my mind. Seriously, cases like this one makes me support efforts to criminalize serious research and publication misconduct.
This is plain and simple theft and the journal is in collusion by not taking action. If they don’t cover something that basic, how the community is supposed to trust the content of other papers as well? This is harmful to everybody.
Only those without ethics and values in their personal life do such unethical activities. A thorough researcher/scientist will never do nefarious activities to get credit for plagiarized research. People without moral values are spoiling research field and its very dangerous for those busy in their serious research activities.
Interestingly the paper isn’t listed at the journal anymore. There is a different paper with the same authors now listed with the the same received, revised and accepted dates along with the page numbers which can be found here: http://www.jcreview.com/admin/Uploads/Files/637b252e064232.57811334.pdf
The abstract of this article has similarities to the following article published in 2017: http://ignited.in/I/a/210984 from the
Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education [JASRAE] (Vol:12/ Issue: 2)
DOI: 10.29070/JASRAE
Even understanding that this journal seems to be a predatory publisher, the current paper (about frog populations) is in need of a copy editor. See the last sentence of the abstract (last 2 sentences shown below):
“Despite the fact that operations last longer in India than in the Moscow area, frogs from southern populations develop more slowly as they get older, with only four years old being higher as India population samples. **In the case of women and men from southern populations, stronger reproductive activities are what causes these discrepancies.**”
Further on in the paper, they seem to analyze some Lilliputian males:
“The bigger size classes for men range from 55.4 to 80.44 mm.”
Later, an astute observation:
“This study also reveals a definite variation in size between males and girls.”