A paper that claimed to have developed a new method to predict acid drainage from mines was not so novel after all, according to one of its authors.
In a series of emails to Retraction Watch, Dulian Zeqiraj of the Polytechnic University of Tirana, Albania, admitted to lifting figures and tables from other articles and said he might also have left some “text as it is in original.”
His paper, “A Novel Stochastic Approach for Modeling Acid Mine Drainage in Three Dimensions,” was published November 17 in Process Safety and Environmental Protection, an Elsevier title.
That the article managed to clear peer review is astonishing, said Muhammad Muniruzzaman, a senior scientist at the Geological Survey of Finland in Espoo, who discovered last week that Zeqiraj’s team had plagiarized his work.
Continue reading Author of ‘gibberish’ paper admits to extensive plagiarism