In June of last year, Salvador Pineda received an email from a researcher at Zhejiang University in China informing him one of his articles had been plagiarized.
The researcher pointed Pineda to a paper, “A robust optimization method for optimizing day-ahead operation of the electric vehicles aggregator,” which appeared in Elsevier’s International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems in November 2021. The article, by researchers at the University of Lahore, Pakistan, contained several figures copied from Pineda’s 2020 paper “An efficient robust approach to the day-ahead operation of an aggregator of electric vehicles,” as well as similar text.
Pineda, an associate professor of engineering at the University of Málaga in Spain, immediately wrote to the journal’s editor-in-chief, who said he’d retract the article, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.
Yet the article remains intact, more than a year later, with the publisher blaming the delay on staffing changes at the journal.
“We are feeling extremely frustrated and cannot understand why it is taking so long to retract such a clear case of plagiarism,” Pineda told us.
A week after Pineda’s email, Vladimir Terzija, editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems, told Pineda and several other researchers the journal would retract three papers for plagiarizing their work.
“The corresponding author of the plagiarized papers accepted his mistake and expressed a strong apology, promising that something like that will never happen in future [sic],” Terzija wrote in emails we have seen. Terzija declined our request for comment.
Ubaid ur Rehman, the corresponding author mentioned by Terzija, last year lost two papers for plagiarism in a Springer journal. “As other plagiarized authors have informed me, papers in other journals [by ur Rehman] were retracted immediately” after the editors received concerns, Pineda said.
The other papers Terzija promised to retract as well as Pineda’s are “A robust vehicle to grid aggregation framework for electric vehicles charging cost minimization and for smart grid regulation” and “Optimal power management framework for smart homes using electric vehicles and energy storage” All three articles remain intact in the journal.
In June, one year after Terzija promised the retractions, Pineda posted on LinkedIn asking fellow researchers for advice on the unresolved situation. Following that post, ur Rehman emailed Pineda to say he had also requested retraction of the paper and was unaware of the “many plagiarism rules.”
“As a young and immature member of the academic community I would like to ask you to please delete this post, I accept that I made mistake [sic] and I ensure you I have a deep regret on this thing, however your LinkedIn post is highlighting this matter on social media which is highly damaging for me,” ur Rehman told Pineda. Ur Rehman did not respond to our request for comment.
“We are aware of these papers and the retraction process is indeed underway,” a spokesperson for Elsevier said, adding, “journal staffing developments presented some delays.”
We’ve previously covered many cases of journals taking a while to act, including a bioinformatics journal that failed to retract an article following a year of requests from the aggrieved author and a 2020 request for retraction over falsified data. Both of those papers still have not been retracted.
“It is deeply disappointing to see that some scientific journals disregard both the integrity of science and the efforts of those who contribute honestly to the field,” Pineda said.
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This is why it’s critical for this organization to exist.
Wow unbelievable… The plagiarist emailed the author he plagiarized to delete his post?