Today, we have the pleasure of presenting a guest post from Mico Tatalovic, who wrote in October aboutretractions in journals in his home country, Croatia. Here, he describes what appears to be an alarming rate of plagiarism in Serbian journals.
A report for the Serbian science ministry by the Centre for Evaluation in Education and Science (CEON) found that whopping 11% of scientific journal articles by Serbian authors published in English language but in Serbian journals were plagiarised. The proportion was similar across all sciences (natural, medical, technical and social).
Apart from widespread plagiarism, they also found that 0.35% of the articles in the the Serbian citation index and journal database (SCIndeks) were published twice in identical form, often in the same journal.
Forgetful editors who still track manuscripts ‘manually’ may forget to mark them as ‘published’, which can result in duplicates in the same journal, according to Pero Sipka, director of CEON.
Interestingly, editors and publishers were less likely to deem a paper plagiarised than were outside analysts, according to the report, and not all editors and publishers openly cooperated.
Given the shocking amount of plagiarism you might also expect to see a flurry of retractions, but it’s not so.
Continue reading A tsunami of plagiarism in Serbia, but hardly any retractions