An Elsevier journal has retracted three papers for plagiarism after more than a year of inaction.
As we reported in August, the editor of the International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems in June 2023 promised to retract the articles, but they remained intact more than a year later.
The following papers have now been retracted:
Continue reading Plagiarizing papers retracted from engineering journal after Retraction Watch report
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
In late May, one of Sasan Sadrizadeh’s doctoral students stumbled upon a paper with data directly plagiarized from his previous work.
Sadrizadeh, a researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, was the last author on “Supply-demand side management of a building energy system driven by solar and biomass in Stockholm: A smart integration with minimal cost and emission,” published in September 2023 in Energy Conversion and Management.
The paper with matching data, “Optimizing smart building energy systems for sustainable living: A realistic approach to enhance renewable energy consumfaption [sic] and reduce emissions in residential buildings,” appeared online as an “article in press” in Elsevier’s Energy and Buildings in May.
Continue reading Elsevier withdraws plagiarized paper after original author calls journal out on LinkedIn
Retraction Watch readers may recall the work of Michael Dougherty, who has established a reputation as a sleuth focused on plagiarism. We are pleased to present an excerpt of Dougherty’s new book, New Techniques for Proving Plagiarism: Case Studies from the Sacred Disciplines at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Studies in Research Integrity, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill 2024).
The principles of textual criticism—borrowed from the fields of classics and medieval studies—have a valuable application for plagiarism investigations. Plagiarists share key features with medieval scribes who worked in scriptoriums and produced copies of manuscripts. Both kinds of copyists—scribes and plagiarists—engage in similar processes, and they commit certain distinctive copying errors that fall into identifiable classes. When committed by plagiarists, these copying errors have probative value for making determinations that a text is copied, and hence, unoriginal.
To demonstrate fully that a text is a plagiarism of another text, one must show how the text is plagiarizing the other text. Many plagiarism researchers, as well as members of institutional research integrity committees, miss this step. They take the mere identification of textual overlap to be the upper limit of analysis. By stopping short, they leave themselves vulnerable to the typical defenses made—sometimes in bad faith—by academic malefactors and their apologists. Those defenses can include: a claim of independent fortuitous discovery; a claim that one was simply recalling a lecture from memory; a claim that one had cryptomnesia from reading many sources; and the like.
Continue reading A look at plagiarism at the Pontifical Gregorian University
In December, Solange Saxby, a postdoctoral research fellow at Dartmouth Health in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was notified by her friend of a paper published in the MDPI journal Nutrients that sounded similar to her dissertation. Saxby pulled up her 2020 dissertation, “The Potential of Taro (Colocasia esculenta) as a Dietary Prebiotic Source for the Prevention of Colorectal Cancer,” and compared it to the 2023 Nutrients article.
To her dismay, the paper “Taro Roots: An Underexploited Root Crop,” co-authored by researchers at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, North Carolina, overlaps significantly with Saxby’s work, including some passages of word-for-word copying with no citation.
While the corresponding author of the paper has called the omission of any citation to Saxby’s work “unfortunate” and said that she is working with Nutrients’ publisher – MDPI – to add one, the publisher said the behavior did not amount to plagiarism because the prior work was a thesis.
Continue reading ‘A disturbing experience’: Postdoc fights to have work that plagiarized her thesis retracted
Last May, Devrim Çavuşoğlu, an engineer at Turkish software company OBSS, was looking at feedback from a conference reviewer of a paper he and his colleagues had submitted. One comment stood out to him: The reviewer had noticed a resemblance between Çavuşoğlu’s work and another paper accepted to a different conference on computational linguistics.
When Çavuşoğlu first skimmed through the other paper, he came across some sections containing an uncanny resemblance to his own ideas. “I thought, it’s like I wrote that,” he recalled. “How could it be so similar, did we think about the same thing?”
He checked the accompanying source code and found the authors of the other paper seemed to have directly copied and built upon his own publicly released code without any attribution – a violation of the license connected to the work. “I was shocked, to be honest,” Çavuşoğlu told Retraction Watch.
Continue reading Caught by a reviewer: A plagiarizing deep learning paper lingers
More than two years after retracting an article by one of its former editors in chief for plagiarism, the British Journal of Sports Medicine has retracted six more pieces by the editor, Paul McCrory, a noted concussion researcher in Australia.
The retractions join 11 more of McCrory’s works, including 10 from BJSM and one from Current Sports Medicine Reports.The BJSM, published by The BMJ, is also correcting two additional articles by McCrory.
Troubles for McCrory – for decades “the world’s foremost doctor shaping the concussion protocols that are used by sports leagues and organizations globally,” according to the New York Times – began in 2021 when Steve Haake, a professor at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, told the BJSM McCrory had plagiarized a 2000 article by Haake in Physics World. (It would not be the only time the work was plagiarized.)
Continue reading Concussion researcher McCrory up to 17 retractions