Enamul Haque, whose master’s thesis was plagiarized by other authors
In June of this year, Enamul Haque, a PhD student at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, came across an article in the International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA).
It looked familiar.
That’s because it was copied, in large part, from Haque’s master’s thesis, which he had completed at Canada’s McMaster University and submitted the previous year. Haque wrote to Kohei Arai, the journal’s editor in chief, on June 30, providing detailed evidence of plagiarism:
The senior author of a book chapter in the 2020 volume that Springer Nature has retracted for plagiarism has blamed a former grad student from Cuba in the affair — a charge she dismisses as “crazy.”
The chapter was retracted nearly 10 months after readers pointed out passages that had appeared to have been churned out by the fake paper generator Mathgen.
Last December, commenters on PubPeer including Guillaume Cabanac and Cyril Labbé — who will be familiar to readers of this blog for their exposure of nonsensical papers with “tortured” language showing signs of plagiarism — pointed out at least one problematic passage in the chapter:
A company that had offered payment for citations of articles in various journals has ended the practice, and fired the staffer it said was responsible, following reporting by Retraction Watch.
On August 31, we reported that Innoscience Innoscience Research, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was offering $6 per citation of papers in five different journals, and up to five cites, or $30, per paper, or $150 in total across all five journals. Since then, two journals have distanced themselvesfrom the scheme.
A second journal has said it was unaware of a cash for citations scheme that named it as a participant, following our reporting in August.
The Journal of Clinical and Translational Research (JCTR) was one of five journals listed by Innoscience Research that Innoscience would pay $6 per citation to its work, as we reported on August 31. On October 9, another of those journals said it “will not entertain cash requests from the individuals who claim to have cited our articles, nor shall we pay up.”
Thanks to a publisher’s error, a group of infectious disease researchers has experienced a double negative for their 2020 article on tick-borne illness in South Africa.
A journal that appeared to be involved in a scheme in which authors were paid bonuses to cite its papers has said it “will not entertain cash requests from the individuals who claim to have cited our articles, nor shall we pay up.”
The comments come about a month after a Retraction Watch post detailing the scheme by Innoscience Research listing five journals, one of which was the International Journal of Bioprinting. Innoscience, who has not responded to requests for comment, does not publish the IJB; Whoice does. It’s unclear whether there is a relationship between the two companies.
An Elsevier journal has corrected a retraction notice after we asked questions about what exactly it was saying — but not before the journal’s editor tried to defend what turned out to be a mistaken passage.
Kyoto University has fired a researcher after determining that he committed fraud in at least five papers about the deadly Kumamoto earthquake of 2006.
The authors of a 2021 article on “cognitive radio” have lost the paper after the journal learned that they’d pilfered the work from a doctoral dissertation.
“A Cluster-Based Distributed Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Techniques in Cognitive Radio” was published in the proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Innovative Data Communication Technologies and Application, which was held in Coimbatore, India. The proceedings was a supplement to Innovative Data Communication Technologies and Application, a Springer Nature title.
Cognitive radio, according to Wikipedia, “can intelligently detect whether any portion of the spectrum is in use, and can temporarily use it without interfering with the transmissions of other users.”
