About two years ago, Marc Duflot, a research engineer at Cenaero, heard a disturbing tale from a collaborator. The collaborator, it seemed, had been asked to review a paper submitted to a journal, and noticed that it was remarkably similar to a paper by Duflot. Duflot’s collaborator recommended that the journal reject the paper, and it did. Duflot tells Retraction Watch (we added a link to the paper in question):
Then, several months later, I discovered that the…paper had been submitted and accepted in Meccanica. If I remember correctly, I discovered it by searching the web with Google Scholar with terms related to my field of expertise.
So in January 2010, Duflot wrote to the editors of Meccanica to alert them to the plagiarism by the authors, M. Garzon and D. Sargoso of the University of Madrid. He concluded his email:
I am deeply disappointed by the fraudulent behaviour of M. Garzon and D. Sargoso. Strangely, I cannot find any mention of these two people on the web neither of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Madrid. Otherwise, I would have reported this to the head of their department.
An editorial assistant got back to him: Continue reading Ghost authorship? Two Meccanica retractions as an author’s work is plagiarized by disappearing scientists
Retraction Watch readers who’ve read Rebecca Skloot’s bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks may remember that decades ago, scientists began realizing that Lacks’s cells, now known as the HeLa cell line and used in labs around the world, were so good at proliferating that they had taken over many other cell lines researchers use to study human disease.
