Author: Dawn Attride

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.

Continue reading A journal editor said he’d retract a paper for plagiarism. A year later, it hasn’t happened.

When Sam Payne reviewed a paper in March for Elsevier’s BioSystems, he didn’t expect to come across a figure he had created in his research. He quickly scrolled through the rest of the paper to find more figures, all copied from his work.

“It’s so blatant,” Payne, an associate professor of biology at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, posted on X. 

Although the journal rejected the paper at Payne’s recommendation, he worried the authors would try to publish elsewhere. 

“I had imagined they would just keep submitting it to new journals until it got accepted, because it was so brazenly plagiarized that they clearly didn’t care,” Payne told Retraction Watch.

Months later, Payne’s worry was justified. The paper, by researchers at First Moscow State Medical University, in Russia, appeared in Wiley’s Proteomics in May. 

Continue reading A scientist peer-reviewed an article that plagiarized his work. Then he saw it published elsewhere.

In November 2013, Elisabeth Bik reported five papers containing what she thought was “pretty obvious” plagiarized text in Karger’s Digestive Diseases to the journal’s editor in chief. 

Eleven years later, one of the bunch, “Inflammatory Bowel Disease as a Risk Factor for Colorectal Cancer,” has been retracted. 

The decision took “a ridiculously long time,” Bik said. “Perhaps they forgot to act, perhaps they lost my email, perhaps they thought it was too much trouble to check, or perhaps they were not sure what to do back in 2013, when I contacted them.” 

Continue reading Cancer paper retracted 11 years after reported plagiarism

A political scientist in Canada copied his postdoc’s work without credit in a paper, according to the retraction notice and a university inquiry report.

The paper by Charles Conteh, a professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, appeared in Sage’s Outlook on Agriculture in October 2023. It has one citation, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

An inquiry by Brock identified plagiarism and uncredited authorship in the article, according to the report finalized this March and seen by Retraction Watch. Failure to give post-doctoral fellows the “opportunity to publish in peer-reviewed journals negatively impacts [them] both reputationally and financially,” the report states. 

Continue reading Exclusive: Prof plagiarized postdoc’s work in now-retracted paper, university found