Jason Arday
In September 2025, Times Higher Education had a bombshell story in the works: A star sociology professor at the University of Cambridge had allegedly plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. thesis and several journal articles. In one of the articles, the borrowed text appeared in quotes from subjects the professor, Jason Arday, claimed to have interviewed himself.
But after Arday enlisted Carter-Ruck, one of the United Kingdom’s leading defamation law firms, to send Times Higher Education a letter, the publication spiked the story, according to three sources who spoke to Retraction Watch.
One of the sources was David Sanders, a biochemist at Purdue University in Indiana, and a sleuth who contributes to the Times Higher Education on topics related to academic misconduct. He reviewed a 63-page dossier of text comparisons prepared by the publication last year and came back with his own findings. “There is no question that there is extensive plagiarism,” Sanders told us.
The allegations against Arday finally emerged last week following a Substack post from Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher at the University of Ghent in Belgium. Cofnas, who is known for his controversial writings on racial differences, independently identified dozens of passages in Arday’s 2015 dissertation that were taken nearly verbatim from the 2009 dissertation of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a reader at Brunel University of London. Cofnas says he learned about the unpublished Times Higher Education story only after he began working on his own piece about Arday.
Arday is known for his work on topics related to race, inequality and education. His interest was more than scholarly: From humble beginnings as a nonverbal autistic kid in South London, he became, at age 37, the youngest Black person appointed to a professorship at Cambridge.
That achievement was covered by the BBC, CBS News, and Good Morning America. He is listed as a collaborator on more than $10 million in recent grants from two U.K. funding agencies, U.K. Research and Innovation and the National Institute for Health and Care Research.
Arday’s achievements have not been limited to academia. He has said he has raised more than $8 million for charity and performed impressive athletic feats, including running 30 marathons in 35 days. His forthcoming memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, is slated to be published next month by Simon & Schuster.
Arday did not respond to three requests for comment sent to his Cambridge email address, but during a plenary he gave at the British Sociological Association conference in Edinburgh this April, he spoke vividly about recent attacks on Black academics.
“You get the email and they say you conducted academic misconduct. And you think to yourself, ‘Well this is incredible. I’m on the back foot here. How do I defend myself against this machine?” he said. “The instruments that are designed to protect academic integrity, designed to protect our wellbeing and our intellectual property, are weaponised.”
A spokesperson for Cambridge told Retraction Watch that Arday was a “victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility” and that he had been cleared of “allegations of plagiarism regarding his thesis and journal publications.”
Carter-Ruck and Times Higher Education did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
In interviews, Arday has said that his path to academic publishing was a rocky one, in part, because he only learned to read and write at the age of 18. “The peer review process was so cruel, it was almost funny, but I treated it as a learning experience and, perversely, began to enjoy it,” he told the BBC in 2023.
Within months of the media attention around his appointment at Cambridge, questions began surfacing about the caliber of that work. On May 4, 2023, Dave Harris, an emeritus professor at Plymouth Marjon University in England, sent Arday a lengthy email. He explained that he had been posting summaries evaluating articles related to critical race theory on his personal website, and he wanted to clear up a few things about Arday’s own work, including a 2018 study in the journal Social Sciences.
In the study, Arday said he conducted focus groups with 32 Black and minority university students in April 2017 to understand the mental health issues they were facing. Although Arday wrote he obtained “informed consent” for the interviews, the article did not include a statement indicating whether his study was approved by an ethics board, as was required by the journal at the time.
Harris wanted to know if Arday could explain some “puzzling similarities” between sentences in that article and a BMJ Open study from epidemiologist Anjum Memon about mental health services in Black and minority communities. Arday ignored his first email, but when Harris followed up several days later, Arday was blunt. “Instead of spending your time trying to dismantle racism and ableism, you have spent what I assume is hours combing through my work looking for mistakes,” he wrote. Arday told Harris not to contact him again: “Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment.”
Harris soon recruited a colleague, Martyn Hammersley, a sociologist at Open University, to review the Social Sciences article himself, and he, too, was concerned. On May 19, 2023, Hammersley sent an email to Hilary Cremin, the Head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, and to Rhys Morgan, the university’s Head of Policy, Governance, and Integrity:
There is substantial plagiarism from one source, and some from another. It is also the case that a considerable portion of the article follows the structure of the paper by Memon et al: even where their words are not used exactly, these are paraphrased (though also elaborated). It even looks as if a couple of the quotations from informants may have been derived from Memon et al. Both of these articles are cited by Arday, but the quotes from them are unattributed.
In a response dated June 21, 2023, Cremin wrote that Arday had agreed “to take the article down from the journal online platform in order to address these concerns” but Arday had the department’s “full support.” Morgan, meanwhile, noted that because the alleged plagiarism occurred prior to his arrival at Cambridge, “we do not consider it within our remit to investigate the paper to which you refer.” (Morgan did not respond to our request for comment, and our email to Cremin received an out-of-office response.)
Six months later, in December 2023, Social Sciences published a correction, adding new citations to make it “clear where ideas were adapted from past research.” A second article, published in Educational Philosophy and Theory, was corrected the following year for text overlap with the Memon paper and other publications.
But the Social Sciences correction notice glossed over the most significant post-publication changes Arday actually made to the text. He removed claims that he analyzed the transcripts from interview subjects with “an iterative coding scheme using NVivo qualitative data analysis software” and had a second researcher “independently read the scripts” and code the data to “enhance the validity of emerging themes and claims.” Instead, he said, he recorded the interviews, transcribed them verbatim and identified salient themes through “review and reflection.”
In addition, Arday changed or removed quotes that had previously been attributed to his interview transcripts. Out of 31 quotes in the original manuscript, he trimmed or reworded 12 of them, and cut 6 of them entirely. Some of the original quotes appear to have been patched together from subjects in Memon’s BMJ Open paper.
Arday numbered his participants from 1 to 32, but there were actually two 13s: One of them he described as a Black female undergraduate and the other as a Black male undergraduate. The Black male undergraduate, according to Arday, viewed clinicians as being instruments of oppression:
Let’s face it … with the stroke of a pen you could be sectioned or sent away for some counseling. Or … have administered some ridiculous dose of whatever kind of medicine.
A similar quote about clinicians appears in Memon et al. attributed to Male D in focus group 1:
With the stroke of a pen to decide whether you are going to be sectioned or whether you are going to be sent away for some counselling. Or … administered some really, really high doses of whatever kind of medicine.
The Black female undergraduate in Arday’s study expressed similar distrust toward the healthcare system:
Within African and West Indian communities … people do not trust psychiatrists in particular.
This sentiment, too, appears to come from Male D in Memon et al:
In the West Indian community … people do not trust psychiatrists particularly.
In the corrected version of Arday’s paper, the quote from the female 13 has been trimmed of the overlap, while the quote from the male 13 has been cut entirely. None of this is described clearly in the correction notice.
“Bloody awful work creeps in when standards are relaxed … in ‘special editions,’ often devoted to ‘activist’ issues like racial inequality,” Harris told us.
The unpublished article in Times Higher Education was bylined by Jack Grove, who has written extensively about the challenges faced by minorities in U.K. institutions, according to Harris, Hammersley and Sanders.
After Grove sent Arday a detailed email in September 2025 offering him an opportunity to respond to the allegations, Times Higher Education received a letter from Carter-Ruck, a law firm known for defending clients ranging from the Church of Scientology to the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky.
Private Eye, a British satire magazine that once tangled with the firm, refers to them as Carter-Fuck.
In its letter, the firm wrote that the allegations were false and they would damage Arday’s reputation. The publication subsequently killed the story.
At the British Sociologists Association meeting, Arday said that he and his colleagues needed to create “their own playbook to combat” the attacks on Black scholars. “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence of good people,” he said. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.”
Cofnas told us he first began looking into Arday’s case on June 13 of this year, when he was contacted by a faculty member at Cambridge who was disappointed by the university’s wan response to the Arday situation. In 2024, Cambridge’s Emmanuel College cut ties with him just two months after he aired his controversial views on race and the meritocracy on his Substack.
In his new post, Cofnas alleged that Arday was hired “to advance the cause of racial diversity” and wrote, “by hiring Jason Arday and refusing to investigate credible accusations against him, isn’t Cambridge making a statement that the only way to have black professors is to abandon all standards?”
Sanders said that what happened at Cambridge is part of a broader phenomenon that has nothing to do with race, which is that journals and universities across the board “do not regard plagiarism by researchers as actionable.” While he abhors “the singling out for investigation of particular members of the academic community because of their ethnicity,” he said that “sometimes the allegations are true, and they need to be addressed fully.”
In one of his follow-up emails to Cambridge, Hammersley had noted that he hoped there had been “a systematic investigation of Professor Arday’s other publications to check for plagiarism … since these were presumably a major part of the basis on which he was appointed at Cambridge.”
He told us he believes that Cofnas’s Substack post was just about the worst place for them to emerge. “It’s an unfortunate situation because it could have been dealt with by Cambridge,” he said. “The result of that is that it means that the only people who will take it up are the people on the radical right.”
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
For context I provide my complete statement. “I have reviewed a number of the cases where scholars of African origin have been accused of plagiarism. I deplore the singling out for investigation of particular members of the academic community because of their ethnicity. Many times the accusations are false or exaggerated. They are being made by people who don’t understand academic standards and have political objectives. Nevertheless, sometimes the allegations are true, and they need to be addressed fully.”
Yes, repeat no.
Maybe it’s time to look into other aspects of this person’s remarkable career. People who respond to criticism with legal threats often have more than one skeleton in their closet.
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/jasonjogs30in35
The impossible feats of athletic prowess and goin from being a nonverbal autistic child to a career in academia show this guy is a colossal fabulist.
Don’t forget he also claimed to be a professional snooker AND soccerplayer. It appears he did a professional snooker match in his younger years. As he himself said in a BBC interview: “I remember thinking if I don’t make it as a football player or a professional snooker player, then I want to save the world.”
How this matches his claims that he only learned to speak and write later in his teens remains a mystery. How very interesting.
It doesn’t sound like he’s claiming to have been those things, just recounting childhood dreams of being a professional athlete or superhero.
Yes, this might prove a fruitful exercise.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/E4B1E99E835D72A2D0AB4E2DF22EF7
One clause in an abstract? Not exactly a scandal.
Of course it isn’t. It is however an illustration that responsible parties with access to plagiarism checking tools should probably look further. This sentence was taken from an abstract to a paper that was not even cited.
So do absolute racists who try to take advantage of power mechanisms to push their agendas and are scared off by law firms. If they are convinced about the strength of the claims, they should publish regardless right?
Absolute racists like the Times Higher Education? That’s who Arday sent Carter-Ruck after.
And now we have those horrible racists at the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2026/aug/01/playbooks-plagiarism-pigs-head-new-claims-surrounding-cambridge-professor-jason-arday
> “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,” he said. “Why would I lie?”
No, the process is the punishment. Responding to a frivolous lawsuit still costs money and time.
Cambridge really messed up with their response here
How odd. According to this piece, “a spokesperson for Cambridge told Retraction Watch that Arday … had been cleared of ‘allegations of plagiarism regarding his thesis and journal publications.’”
I suppose “cleared of” (which is not in quotation marks above, so it’s not necessarily the verb Cambridge used) could be true in the sense that some authority figure concluded or decreed that no policy had been violated, rather than “didn’t plagiarize.” It’s the difference between “not guilty” and “didn’t do it.” Or between sophistry and truth-seeking. The situation reminds me of a famous exchange early in Plato’s Euthyphro:
Socrates: Suppose, my friend, that you and I disagreed about which of two numbers was greater. Would disagreement about such things make us enemies and angry with one another? Or would we not quickly settle the matter by resorting to calculation?
Euthyphro: Certainly.
Socrates: And if we disagreed about which of two things was larger or smaller, would we not quickly put an end to the disagreement by measuring them?
Euthyphro: Yes.
Socrates: And I suppose that if we disagreed about which was heavier or lighter, we would settle the matter by weighing them?
Euthyphro: Of course.
Socrates: Then what subjects are there about which, if we disagreed and could not reach a satisfactory decision, we would become hostile and angry with one another? Perhaps you cannot immediately say, so consider whether they are these: the just and the unjust, the noble and the shameful, and the good and the bad. Are these not the subjects about which, when we disagree and cannot arrive at a satisfactory judgment, we become enemies whenever we do become enemies—you and I and everyone else?
Euthyphro: Yes, Socrates. Those are the subjects about which we disagree.
***
In this case, though, Cambridge University is implying that we do indeed disagree about differences that could be resolved by calculation, measurement, or weighing them.
Cambrige’s answer is clearly disingenious when Rhys Morgan, the university’s Head of Policy, Governance, and Integrity says that because the alleged plagiarism occurred prior to his arrival at Cambridge, “we do not consider it within our remit to investigate the paper to which you refer.”
The absurdity of such a statement is clear when one notes that a PhD is always written before becoming professor. Same with many journal articles.
Just think of havrad’s president shown to have plagiarized papers and led to resign…
A PhD is not a”conditio sine qua non” to become a University Professor, but if it is proven that the degree has been obtained through plagiarism then the University has the absolute duty to revoke the professorship.
Prof. Cofnas is doing the University and scholarship at large an enormous favour by forcing them to reckon with this.
And yes, ‘wokeness’ may go some of the way to explain their reluctance to act on the overwhelming evidence they’ve had for a year now, but most of it is simply that no one ever likes to admit they’ve been made a fool of.
“You can only wish you were as virtuous as we.”
“Star sociology professor” and it’s just grievance studies slop.
It should be very straighforward to run the PhD thesis through a plagiarism software
https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/4552/1/158222_Jason%20Arday_%20Final%20PhD%20Thesis%20Vesrion%20Final%20Draft%20Oct%202015.pdf
What about the University he did his thesis at to do a formal investigation?
This warrants another investigation. But I am disappointed in this post.
There’s no mention of the university where he did his doctorate (LJMU) or the first investigation. But there is more than enough discussion around his race / racial views and Cambridge.
Unbalanced reporting by Retraction Watch. I’m not surprised it has stirred up hateful comments on social media.
Are you saying that if mentioning Arday’s doctoral institution would have mitigated hateful comments on social media?
Private Eye refers to Carter-Ruck as Carter-F*** and quite rightly so.
Putting aside the issue of plagiarism I am at a loss to understand how this individual could be a superstar professor at all. His PhD was from a middling institution at best. He works in a field that appears to require no skills whatsoever. Auto ethnographies, ad hoc interview rosters with weak experimental design, and it doesn’t appear that he has more than elementary school mathematics. His publication record is impossibly weak for his position let alone Superstar status.
I was struck by this as well. Even if the work *weren’t* plagiarized, this guy has a fraction of the publications I would expect from someone who would have a Cambridge chair. I skimmed his pubs, and the work he has done is mostly literature reviews, or have him as a secondary author, or have very broad, uninteresting arguments that add up to simply repeating “there’s racism in education” (note: this is a completely valid area of research and there is lots of interesting work that could be done on it….but he’s not doing it). There’s just nothing approaching original research and argumentation (again, even setting aside the plagiarism claims). Also, and this isn’t the most important thing, but it REALLY bothered me–he is just a terrible, terrible writer. I am not exaggerating when I say he would be in the bottom quarter of the undergraduate classes that I teach. How is he supposed to teach undergraduates to think and write (let alone graduate students)? The whole thing is just really weird and depressing and suggests to me that the people who appointed him were not thinking about whether he had the skills to do basic parts of the job. It’s particularly difficult to stomach, too, in a moment when places like Exeter are firing whole departments full of good scholars.
Well he mainly got hired for his backstory most likely. Also, it’s a field that’s quite different from exact sciences in terms of publishing output.
I published a YouTube video on this very question on my own channel about six months ago. The autoethnography needs to be squelched. It is not a rigorous research method and allows professors to punch out research articles almost effortlessly. And you nailed it when you said that his field requires no skills. I’ve always wanted to ask professors in these fields “What you are good at”? My gut feeling is that I will get nothing but blank stares in response.
Prof. Jason Arday is unique and one of a kind. At a time when universities face immense financial difficulty yet HEI academics instead of supporting their own students try and find avenues to smear Jason’s reputation!
This is completely outrageous!
What it appears to me is lots of white academics trying to call out a single Black academic. Have we seen examples of this before? Yes, we have it happens daily in the Public Services!
You can’t cheat an honest man. Perform your research rigorously and you foil the evil plot against your reputation.
https://goodlawproject.org/petition/stand-in-solidarity-with-jason-arday/
Please sign this petition
Why? Do you truly believe retraction watch is just some right wing rag? Can you provide some counter evidence as to why these plagiarism claims are completely unfounded and just a smear despite the wealth of evidence?
The man plagiarized, color of skin has nothing to do with academic dishonesty
Yes, the truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Is something rotten in the State of Denmark aka The University of Cambridge ?
Every credible accusation of plagiarism and academic dishonesty of any kind must be investigated, but this article was weird.
I don’t know if it’s the title or the prose, but this feels far more “clickbaity” than usual retractionwatch articles.
Also, it brings up race so much, which feels somewhat unwarranted as universities are quite famous for trying to hush up plagiarism accusations directed at their professors, of any background, as it reflects badly on them that they didn’t do a proper background examination! Not to mention ones they know are dodgy, but bring some big grants with them so it’s overlooked.
The corrections to the Social Sciences article detailed here, in particular, are certainly concerning. However, I agree with the comments saying that the tone of this post was weird. I’m surprised, for example, that Cofnas’s views are glossed over as ‘controversial writings on racial difference’. Cofnas has literally argued that black people are less intelligent on average than white people. Dave Harris is presented as a neutral third party looking to summarise research for students, but he has self-published a critique of critical race theory (which was itself part of a right-wing media circus when it led to him having his emeritus status first revoked, and then restored). It is not surprising that someone who works on CRT would be wary of being contacted by him.
These details are omitted, though certainly relevant to the motivation behind these individuals’ investigation of Arday’s work. On the other hand, Arday’s personal background, racial views and tone of correspondence are put under immense scrutiny, when they are not relevant to his academic conduct in these cases.
I would expect better from this blog.
I also kind of don’t care if he lied about playing snooker, and don’t necessarily see what that has to do with questions about plagiarism (which seem completely open and shut anyway–it took me three minutes of reading the dissertation to unambiguously see that most of it was plagiarized). But it’s tricky because Arday himself seems to have made his biographical claims central to his professional identity at every turn. It’s not that people are invasively digging all this private information about him up–every interview with him is framed as an inspirational story about his early life and background (and, tellingly, in those settings there’s basically nothing about what he researches or has proven/shown…his life experiences are kind of substituting in for any research or academic work). Live by the sword of using your sympathetic life story as a substitute for doing actual academic work, die by the sword of using your sympathetic life story as a substitute for actual academic work…..
“Cofnas has literally argued that black people are less intelligent on average than white people.”
Well … is this wrong? Maybe google “black-white IQ gap”.
Are we not going to talk about the fact that Cofnas is a white supremacist? https://philarchive.org/archive/LARMTP-2?
But is Cofnas a plagiarist?
One thing about this has driven me absolutely bananas. Other coverage of the Cambridge plagiarism scandal has reprinted an email sent by Hilary Cremin, the Head of the Education Faculty at Cambridge, responding to someone’s concerns that Arday had plagiarized an article (note: this is the article plagiarism, not the dissertation plagiarism). Here’s what she said about the meeting where they discussed it:
“During our meeting Prof Arday spoke movingly about his ongoing experiences of direct and indirect racism, and the conditions that he was living in whilst the 2018 article was being prepared (in 2016). At this time he was early career and living away from home whilst dealing with significant health issues.”
Hilary Cremin’s claim: experiencing racism and/or health issues exempt faculty from their ethical obligations. Even if Arday were telling the truth about these things, it is an insane statement for someone in charge of a Cambridge department to make when confronted with clear faculty wrongdoing. Also, this is classic manipulation, familiar to anyone who has ever had to discipline students for plagiarism: the immediate response from students is invariably “I know I plagiarized, but I simply can’t be held accountable because of [insert excuse about health problem/anxiety/personal situation]”. Enforcing professional standards is not easy–it is often actually quite unpleasant. But it is a core, necessary part of our jobs, and I’m surprised to see someone in Professor Cremin’s position fall for the oldest trick in the book and to abdicate her professional responsibilities so quickly.
I mean honestly this is huge. Regardless of the politics. How on earth these persons end up being profs in a top UK university. If the guy is indeed a fraud (that is to have plagiariazed his thesis) why then are there so many people defending him? Plagiarism is easy to investigate.
I was expecting RW to do at least the easy part: run the thesis (which is in the open domain) through, say Turnitin, and present the results. Then ask the university for a comment, or at least check who the supervisor was (it is in the acknowledgements), send them an email or at least google them. Oh… there is more to the story, right?
Indeed: I try to stay away from these politically hot topics, but the evidence put forward was pretty damning, with politics or without politics. In other words, someone has already ran it through Turnitin, and much more, I suppose.
Cambridge is deservedly getting a lot of the flack for this entire situation, but I’m also very surprised that the journal Social Sciences hasn’t yet pulled the 2018 article. There’s clear-cut evidence in this piece that the article had fabricated data (a substantially worse breach of standards than plagiarism)–how on earth can the journal let it stand? Daniel McCarthy at Surrey appears to be the editor–what is the editorial board *thinking*? And what on earth are the standards at that journal like?
This issue has a rancid ring of pathological resentment based on envy and jealousy. It also brings to light some of the challenges faced by those have neurodivergent needs. I think the general expectation that many of you have of someone who has been diagnosed with autism is that they should be in some medium secure unit on the outskirts of Valhalla. Many years ago, i taught at a school for children with special education needs and twenty years later, whenever i see them in the streets, they are NEET. Life is very cruel indeed.
People do not have a “neurodivergent need” to repeatedly plagiarize and find excuses (and defenders!) for not facing consequences for it. I’m sure there are plenty of neurodivergent people who have figured out you have to do your own research when you claim you’ve done your own research.
Ethically worse than plagiarism is the proven fabrication of research results. He stole supposed interviewee quotes from other papers. He stole supposed interview quotes from his own papers and used them in other papers. The guy is a pathological lier and also cannot write, reason or think beyond high school level. Did you see the latest in the Guardian about the pig’s head and the masked, knife-wielding men, undetectable by CCTV stalking him in his office? Anyone who defends Jason at this point is waving a big red flag about their own ethics, intelligence and scholarship. And yes I am referring to people in the comments above.
The focus about Professor Arday’s academic work has been on plagiarism, for obvious reasons. But if you look at his primary research, there are problems there too.
In the article “‘More to prove and more to lose’: race, racism and precarious employment in higher education” there are some obvious concerns, similar to the issues around participant quotes mentioned in the post here. Five of the participants are given conflicting descriptions of their backgrounds (5, 6, 11, 13 and 16) when the professor quotes them. For example, P11 is described on p521 as black, female and an academic, on p522 as Asian, female and professional services and on p526 as mixed heritage, female and an academic. At the very least, this smacks of extreme carelessness, especially when the context is that only two participants are cited more than once and consistently (2 and 8). Here’s a link if you want to check for yourself: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/01425692.2022.2074375?needAccess=true
The article in Social Sciences discussed in the post also has problems, even after being corrected following a previous complaint. Participant 2 is quoted three times, first being described as female, mixed heritage and a post-grad, then as male, mixed heritage and a post-grad, then as male, Asian and an under-graduate (pages 13, 14 and 15 respectively). Only one other participant is quoted more than once, in this case consistently. Excluding participant 2, the quoted participants comprise 15 females and 2 males. This is odd because the participants in total were 18 women and 14 men. So either the men were cited far, far less than one would expect, or there is some other problem. It’s also hard to understand the selection of participants who are quoted, especially how nobody numbered 21 to 28 inclusive is quoted at all and why only two people are cited more than once (16 are quoted just once). In practice, I’d have expected a more random selection and more people quoted more than once.
Unfortunately, the journals do not provide any links to the primary research material, even though it should be simple enough to do this without compromising any participants (as the data should be available in an anonymised form).
Other people have noted how the methodology for both these pieces of research is so similar and described in almost identical words. As you can’t plagiarise yourself, that’s fair enough. But my question would be why use such a labour-intensive approach, with “semi-structured interviews and unstructured focus groups”, especially with the same people? One of these methods would involve a lot of work, two would be a huge amount and the second method would really add very little. As it is, the published article leaves the reader to guess whether any particular quote comes fron an interview or a focus group. There are other obvious causes for concern, such as all participants seemingly speaking with a uniform voice – in reality, there should be some people who disagree on something at least. If not, how was the sample chosen or the material analysed? And when everyone agrees and the findings are wholly consistent with previous research, is the work of much value? I say this as someone who taught research methods to business students for 16 years and therefore has a lot of experience of social research and also of people cheating.
Whether there is any malpractice in the primary research reported in these two articles, I cannot say. But it would help dispel any unfair criticisms if the transcripts were now published alongside the articles.