The chief executive of a university in Eastern India whose research is full of tortured phrases – possible signs of plagiarism – had two papers pulled in December after investigations found evidence of “compromised” peer review and other red flags in the publications.
A third article by the executive, Amiya Kumar Rath, has also come under scrutiny, a publisher told us.
Rath became vice chancellor of Biju Patnaik University of Technology in Rourkela in 2023. A computer scientist with more than 100 publications, he is listed as the second author of one of the now-withdrawn works, a 2020 review article on inspecting and grading fruits using machine learning.
Two years after the review was published in Springer Nature’s Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, another computer scientist, Guillaume Cabanac, flagged it on PubPeer. As Cabanac pointed out, the paper contained several odd wordings for well-known scientific concepts, like “fluffy rationale” instead of “fuzzy logic.” Such tortured phrases can be a sign authors have tried to avoid plagiarism detection by using paraphrasing software.
How the strange language slipped through peer review is not clear, but the retraction notice offers clues. “The article was submitted to be part of a guest-edited issue,” the notice states. “An investigation by the publisher found a number of articles, including this one, with a number of concerns, including but not limited to compromised editorial handling and peer review process, inappropriate or irrelevant references or not being in scope of the journal or guest-edited issue.”
The review has been cited 63 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Springer Nature told us the problematic special issue was titled “Social & Privacy Computing in Intelligent Social System,” but would not share the guest editor’s name “owing to confidentiality considerations.”
Rath did not respond to our requests for comment.
The other retracted article, on a type of network management called software-defined networking in the cloud, was part of a 2020 special issue of the International Journal of Intelligent Unmanned Systems. Rath was one of two authors of the work.
The paper does not show as retracted on the publisher’s new platform, Emerald Insight, and elsewhere. But Laura Etchells, head of research integrity at the company, told us all of the articles in the special issue “were actually retracted due to an investigation that uncovered evidence that the peer review process had been compromised.”
The paper on grading fruits is not the only work by the vice chancellor that is plagued by tortured phrases. One of his conference papers contains the weird phrases “underground creepy crawly state” – presumably a paraphrased version of “ant colony” – and “counterfeit honey bee state,” for “artificial bee colony.”
An article Rath published in Elsevier’s Procedia Computer Science in 2020 also contains several strange phrases, such as “limit esteem” instead of “threshold value,” according to an anonymous PubPeer post from 2023. In many places the paper is close to unintelligible, with such mangled sentences as, “Image segmentation meant way toward sectioning default image into its tremendous sections or objects.”
That paper has been cited 126 times, according to the publisher, and is still in circulation more than two years after it was flagged. Three of its four authors also appear on the byline of the fruit-grading article.
Elsevier told us, “The journal was not aware of any concerns regarding the publication; an investigation has now been initiated.”
Meanwhile, a side-by-side comparison shows large parts of the article, garbled language and all, overlaps verbatim with yet another paper – a preprint from 2022 by a different group of researchers in India. An online plagiarism checker determined nearly half of the text in the preprint was identical to passages in Rath’s paper.
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