Category: plagiarism

Earlier this month, Werther Ramalho, an environmental scientist in Brazil, got some bad news from a colleague: A paper he’d published in 2013 as a postdoctoral researcher had been plagiarized in its entirety.

“They stole years of effort and dedication that I had at the beginning of my career as a scientist! Horrible!” Ramalho, who is currently affiliated with the Instituto Boitatá de Etnobiologia e Conservação da Fauna, told us. 

Ramalho’s original paper, “Study on the population structure of the paradoxical frog, Pseudis bolbodactyla (Amphibia: Anura: Hylidae), using natural markings for individual identification,” was published in the journal Zoologia and has been cited three times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

In his career as a psychologist, Andrew Colman had only experienced being plagiarized once: In the early 1970s, an acquaintance tried to take credit in print for a psychometric scale that Colman had developed. Colman wrote to the journal, which quickly confirmed the plagiarism and printed a corrigendum in the next issue. 

And in the past year, Colman has learned of two more instances of his work – a 2004 paper on game theory in medical consultation – being stolen. He isn’t finding the journals so responsive this time around. 

A prominent sports medicine researcher who earlier this year had an editorial from his time as the top editor of the British Journal of Sports Medicine retracted for plagiarism has lost nine more articles for stealing and recycling text and misrepresenting a reference. 

The British Journal of Sports Medicine has also placed expressions of concern on all other articles on which Paul McCrory, who was the journal’s editor-in-chief from 2001-2008, is the sole author, totalling 38 articles, according to a press release from the journal. (We count 78 single author papers for McCrory in BJSM.)

McCrory is a widely cited expert on concussions, and has worked with major sporting agencies and leagues as a consultant.

On August 10 of last year, Jim Stagge, an environmental engineering professor at The Ohio State University, emailed editors of Water Resources Management, a Springer Nature title, to let them know that a paper in the journal had taken significant blocks of his text without attribution.

The Water Resources Management paper in question, “Recommendations for Modifying the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) for Drought Monitoring in Arid and Semi-arid Regions,” was published July 16, 2021. Stagge said that it borrowed liberally from a paper of his, “Candidate Distributions for Climatological Drought Indices (SPI and SPEI),” that was published in the International Journal of Climatology in 2015.

The 2021 paper, with first author Peyman Mahmoudi from the University of Sistan and Baluchestan in Iran, did cite Stagge’s 2015 work, but didn’t indicate that large sections taken directly from Stagge and his co-authors were quotes.

Leslie McIntosh, like many other denizens of Science Twitter, saw a tweet from a pseudonymous account in mid-March that bemoaned a journal’s lack of action after the owner of the account reported “an obvious case of plagiarism.”

The owner of the account had found a paper that ripped off one by his or her own research group while browsing the literature. “It isnt just sentence copying, the whole structure and concept of the paper is THE SAME,” the account tweeted later in the thread. 

McIntosh, CEO and cofounder of Ripeta, a tech company that offers automated tools to assess scientific papers, began looking into the paper and its corresponding author, Mohammed Sahab Uddin. 

Eighteen months after the editor in chief of a Springer Nature journal received allegations of plagiarism – and more than a year after the editor apparently decided to retract it – the article remains intact and the journal’s investigation has not yet concluded. 

The paper, “Robotic Standard Development Life Cycle in Action,” was published in the Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems in November 2019. It has been cited 13 times, according to Clarivate Analytics, five of those since the journal received the allegations. 

Its abstract states: 

In 2019, we wrote about a reviewer who stole a manuscript and published it under his own name. Today, we bring you the sequel.

The sequel involves a plea for forgiveness after the plagiarized paper was retracted, and a second allegation of stealing work – which has prompted the target of the plagiarism to wonder if a more serious response from the journal to the first instance would have discouraged the second. 

We obtained an email the reviewer, Yuvarajan Devarajan, sent after the retraction to Mina Mehregan, a mechanical engineer at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran whose work he copied. In it, he explains what happened, and asks, beginning in all caps in the subject line, for her to “FORGIVE ME IF POSSIBLE”: