Seven barred from research after plagiarism, duplications in eleven papers

A retired Nepali professor and six others have been barred from research after plagiarism and duplicated images were found in 11 of their papers.

Parashuram Mishra, a retired crystallographer at Tribhuvan University, in Nepal, is the lead author on all the studies. Most of the papers contain image duplications; the same figures were reused across multiple studies. But two figures that Mishra published, according to the university’s findings, were plagiarized from a 2010 study by a British team, and a 2020 study by researchers at the University of Monastir, in Tunisia.

Last December, Armel Le Bail, crystallographer at the Université du Maine in Les Mans, France, began flagging Mishra’s studies on PubPeer and his personal website. He reported his findings to the vice-chancellor of Tribhuvan University, Dharma Kant Baskota, on January 4th.

An executive council at the university, formed on Jan. 17, found that the 11 papers — published in journals like Research Inventy International Journal of Engineering and Science and Elixir Crystal Growth — also had 40% matching text when they ran them through Grammarly, a text plagiarism software, according to a public document released by the university. The council issued three penalties:

1 To retract all articles published by Professor Mishra related with this case.

2 Warning professor Mishra and other those who have engaged in this publication work for not allowing them to engage in such works from now on. 

The university also barred Mishra from research for life, writing:

3 The Executive Council of the university has also decided to bar professor Mishra from supervising student`s dissertations and engaging in research activities forever. Also, a circular is being made throughout the country for not to recognize these articles for their academic contributions and promotions. 

Six other individuals, three of them PhD students at Tribhuvan University, were also penalized, according to the executive council’s report. Those six were asked to retract the plagiarized studies and were banned from supervising student theses or conducting “other research activities” for two years. One, Rohit Dev, was also banned from “teaching in any colleges across the country,” according to reporting by the Kathmandu Post. The six individuals that received penalties are:

• Hareram Mishara, a lecturer in physics at Tribhuvan University.
• Rohit Kumar Dev, a part-time chemistry faculty member at Tribhuvan University and a PhD candidate in chemistry.
• Janak Adhikari, a lecturer in chemistry at Tribhuvan University and a PhD candidate in chemistry.
• Yub Raj Sahu, a lecturer in chemistry at Tribhuvan University and a PhD candidate in chemistry.
• Bimal Kumar Kanth, a lecturer in chemistry at Tribhuvan University.
• Kalpana Mishra, who is not affiliated with the university.

Le Bail started looking into Mishra’s work last October, after receiving an alert about a new paper on Google Scholar. That study, which solved the structure of a metal material, had an anomaly in its data: the bond length, or space between atoms in the structure, was improbably short. 

“It was a kind of shock,” Le Bail, who flagged the paper on ResearchGate, told us. 

When he didn’t get a reply from the authors, Le Bail tweeted about the study and sent an email, on Oct. 8, to a general information email address affiliated with Tribhuvan University.

On Dec. 1, Le Bail tweeted about two studies by Mishra that contained a duplicated figure, despite being about completely different metal materials. Shortly after his tweet, according to Le Bail, other Twitter users identified more studies by Mishra with image duplications. Le Bail began documenting the papers on his website and PubPeer. He has flagged 17 papers by Mishra on his website thus far.

On Jan. 4, 2021, Le Bail emailed the vice-chancellor’s office at Tribhuvan University, urging them to “see the list of papers and details on figures reusing,” on his website. He also sent emails to Nepali journalists and editors at nine different journals that had, collectively, published 15 different studies by Mishra.

Five days later, on Jan. 9, Khadga K.C., a professor at Tribhuvan University and the executive director of its Center for International Relations, assured Le Bail that they would “take necessary step to penalize the concern person,” and would “form the committee and implement their finding soon,” according to an email seen by Retraction Watch.

Mishra, who did not respond to our requests for comment, emailed Le Bail on Jan. 11, writing:

Thank you for your kind interested in our published articles and  provided major comments regarding the faults of the articles.Further I would like to inform you that being a researcher of least developed country like Nepal and initial stage of research there is no well sophisticated laboratory for the analysis of crystals but we have tried the crystal analysis any hoe [sic] so far so we withdraw  all the cited  articles from Reserachgate [sic].I am pleased to write here that we would like to collaborate with you in the field of crystallography in proper way structure analysis.At last we apologise for these faults. 

Tribhuvan University formed a “probe committee” to investigate Le Bail’s claims on Jan. 17, according to the council’s report. The committee was chaired by Ram Chandra Basnet, the head of the school’s organic chemistry department, and also included Niranjan Parajuli and Bhanu Bhakta Neupane, a chemist and physicist.

On March 20th, the executive council finalized their decision, according to an email from Khadga that we saw. Two days later, Khadga told Le Bail that the entire university was relieved, and that “we will do our best to maintain originality of any academic works.” Khadga and Basnet did not respond to our requests for comment.

For Le Bail, the decision isn’t enough:

I feel a bit disappointed by the fact that only 11 of the 17 papers listed in the Crystallography Horror Museum [his personal website] were retained for scientific misconduct by the decision of the Tribhuvan University Executive Council. Only the multiple reusing of figures, some of them stolen from other papers, was considered. 

Le Bail lamented the fact that the papers, which he said broke “elementary rules” of crystallography, were published at all:

None of these papers was scrutinized by a decent reviewer otherwise they would have been all rejected.

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