An Elsevier journal allowed a paper containing extensive plagiarism to remain online, while letting its authors make undisclosed revisions that masked the offense, Retraction Watch has learned. But the journal’s editor-in-chief told us he has subsequently decided to retract the paper.
The article, on cognitive impairment among older adults in India, appeared online on June 15 as a pre-proof in Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics Plus. At that point, its background section included several long paragraphs that were identical, or near-identical, to text in an extended conference abstract from 2024. The study’s objectives and methods also bore strong similarity to the earlier work, which had been conducted by another group of researchers.
Poulami Barman, first author of the conference abstract and a dual-program Ph.D. student in India and Germany, became aware her work had been stolen after one of her supervisors alerted her to the new paper. It turned out she knew the article’s corresponding author well. Like Barman, Madhurima Sharma was a Ph.D. student at the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) in Mumbai, and she had previously asked Barman to share her code. Barman had refused to do so until her work was published.
Shocked at what she had discovered, Barman messaged Sharma.
“What are you talking about?” Sharma wrote back in correspondence we obtained. “I did not even see your paper,” she added, referring to the abstract. “So how can I copy?”
She had written her paper “with the help of ai and as well as existing literatures [sic],” Sharma claimed.
But the plagiarism was impossible to miss, with clear overlap in both text and study design. On June 23, Barman, who is also at the University of Rostock, in Germany, contacted the journal, providing a side-by-side comparison of the two works. A journal manager replied that the publisher would look into her complaint.
A few days later, Barman noticed that the plagiarized paragraphs had been revised in the paper’s version of record, dated June 30, without any explanation. She again contacted the journal to find out what was going on, but didn’t hear back.
Then on July 22, Sharma sent Barman an email stating she had revised her paper “in full coordination with the journal editor” after “being made aware of the overlap” between their texts.
“They let her modify the article, and that was, like, completely unethical,” Barman told us. “It should be retracted because it was completely plagiarized.”
When Barman wrote to the journal yet again, she was told by the journal manager on July 24 that “the investigation is on-going and our Editor in Chief & Publisher are already discussing on this matter to find a better solution.”
Sharma told us that after being contacted by the journal, “I recognized my mistake and immediately took action and revised the document. The Journal subsequently informed me that the revised paper was acceptable and published it.”
She also said some of the data her study was based on differed from those Barman had used, adding, “Objectives and results are different.”
Sharma did not respond to follow-up questions asking what exactly her “mistake” had been.
Liang-Kung Chen, editor-in-chief of Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics Plus, told us he had “decided to retract this paper on July 26, so we did have certain actions on this paper. The retraction process is going on at the publisher’s (Elsevier’s) end.”
After learning the journal had allowed Sharma to change the plagiarized text, Barman took to LinkedIn to vent her frustration in a post that garnered dozens of comments, several of them from scholars describing similar experiences. One implicated Sharma.
“Unfortunately, something very similar happened to me with the same author you mentioned,” wrote Sayani Das, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Social Work at Bar-Ilan University, in Israel. “She asked me for all the details and then published her paper based on my preprint. Since then, I’ve stopped sharing papers as preprints, as I’m afraid of such so-called researchers.”
In a rejoinder on LinkedIn that disappeared when Barman blocked her, Sharma wrote, in part, “I want to state clearly and unequivocally: I did not copy either of your work [sic] not your title, not your tables, and not your results.”
Srinivas Goli, an associate professor at IIPS, said in a comment on the post he had “consistently emphasized in my classes that you don’t need dozens or hundreds of papers to advance in your academic and professional career.” But, he added, “Unfortunately, a deeply flawed mindset has taken root among some students, pushing them toward shortcuts and unethical practices. We must remind them that a successful career is not built on the number of papers but on skills, knowledge and ethics.”
Asked for comment, IIPS told us it would try to sort out what had happened in a physical meeting with “the student” and requested us “not to proceed in this matter.”
Meanwhile, the second author of the offending paper, Abdul Fathah, also a doctoral student at IIPS, wrote on LinkedIn that his “sole contribution to the paper was in conducting the data analysis.”
“I was not informed or made aware that substantial portions of the manuscript were copied from another researcher’s work,” Fathah wrote. “I deeply regret this serious breach of academic ethics, and I unreservedly condemn plagiarism of any kind.”
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