While plagiarism can sometimes be difficult to prove, stolen figures and identical metadata were the death knell for a recent article involving chicken mortality.
In September, the authors of a 2022 paper in the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers’ journal Applied Engineering in Agriculture discovered a version of their article published by different authors in the International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology. Both papers, which had identical titles, describe the development of a robot designed to assist with detecting and removing dead chickens from farms.
Although some of the text in the 2025 IJERT paper was altered, the images are the same as those from the ASABE paper, which has been cited 13 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The IJERT paper also replaced the word “broiler,” a chicken raised for meat production, with “grill,” including paraphrasing “broiler mortality” as “grill mortality” and “U.S. broiler industry” as “American grill business.” Such tortured phrases, which occur when common phrases are transformed into nonsensical ones, can indicate plagiarism.
The original authors reached out to Joseph Walker, ASABE’s director of publications, who emailed IJERT about the suspect paper. The journal responded on October 1 saying they “found [the paper] copied” and would remove it in 24 hours, Walker told us. IJERT also banned the authors from publishing in the journal for the next two years. The three authors of the IJERT paper don’t have affiliations listed, and LinkedIn messages sent to the likely authors went unanswered.
The article was removed from the website after Walker contacted the journal and the page read “Retracted by Author.” After we reached out, the journal removed the paper’s page completely, although the PDF remains online.
IJERT is not indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science and appeared on Beall’s list of potential predatory journals and publishers, which went dark in 2017 but is archived here.
Walker pointed out the PDF property title for the IJERT article, “PAFS15013,” is the same as that for the ASABE paper. The author listed in the metadata for both files is “miller” — for the ASABE editor who created the PDF. The DOI on the retraction notice page links to Zenodo, an open repository. The Zenodo page associated with the paper has been removed by the owner for copyright infringement, it states.
In response to a request we sent to IJERT, the journal said it uses an “in-house developed system to automatically screen submissions for similarity and potential plagiarism.” The email was signed “Editor.”
IJERT’s website doesn’t list an editor-in-chief, but rather six managing editors and 14 associate editors.
The IJERT editor told us the article was retracted “after it was confirmed that portions of the content were improperly copied” from the ASABE paper.
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