Last September, a researcher at a university in Bangladesh emailed a journal about a paper he had published in 2019. He made a stark admission: the paper contained plagiarism, said Sorif Hossain, a lecturer in statistics at Noakhali Science and Technology University, who called for the article to be promptly retracted.
But the paper remained in place. Only after Retraction Watch contacted the European Journal of Environment and Public Health (EJEPH) last week did it issue a retraction.
In June 2021, Espen Flo Bødal began to believe that a paper he’d co-authored had been stolen.
The news came via a ResearchGate alert that the Norwegian researcher’s work had been cited, according to the publication Universitets(article in Norwegian). When Bødal checked the alert, he saw that part of his doctoral thesis had been published, essentially word for word.
But instead of his name and those of his collaborators at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the article listed researchers at the Huzhou Power Supply Company and North China Electric Power University as its authors.
After reading a paper published in The Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England last March, Andrew Thomas, an orthopedic surgeon in the UK, noticed that it was very similar to an article published the previous December in another journal.
In his letter, Thomas pointed out several apparent mistakes in the analyses, and also noted similarities between both papers and a 2017 article published inThe Lancet Infectious Diseases, which has been cited 93 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Despite the similarities Thomas noted, which another surgeon verified with anti-plagiarism software, the journal has not retracted the paper, but flagged it with an expression of concern so readers can “draw their own conclusions.” At the same time, the journal retracted an unrelated article that was also found to be similar to one published elsewhere, then the retraction was changed to an expression of concern, and now neither notice appears online.
Weeks after the British Medical Journal corrected a press release about nine retractions and dozens of expressions of concern to mark articles by a prominent concussion expert, a spokesperson for the journal told us it’s still “an ongoing effort” to identify all the articles on which the expert is the sole author.
The concussion researcher, Paul McCrory, was editor in chief of the British Journal of Sports Medicine, published by the BMJ, from 2001-2008, and published many editorials on which he was the only listed author. McCrory also chaired the influential Concussion in Sport Group, was involved in drafting consensus statements on concussion in sports, and consulted with leagues.
Ten of those articles, however, have been retracted this year for plagiarism, recycling his own work, and misrepresenting a reference.
In comments to us, his only public statements to date about the matter, McCrory acknowledged some of the plagiarism as unintentional “errors,” and offered “my sincere and humble apologies.” He no longer chairs the Concussion in Sport Group, and the Australian Football League has critically reviewed his work for the league, the Guardian Australia reported.
Following a Retraction Watch story about a 2004 paper that had been copied twice since its publication, one of the journals involved has taken down its version of the article.
One of the plagiarizing articles, “Relevance of Game Theory Models in Medical Consultation: Special Reference to Decision Making,” appeared last year in the International Journal of Research in Engineering, Science and Management (IJRESM). Colman said that the article had copied the structure and main ideas of his, although the text was paraphrased, and it included a figure he had created.
We had emailed the journal before our story was published on Oct. 17 to ask if it would investigate the allegations. We received this reply on November 5th:
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.
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 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.”
13 months since I reported an obvious case of plagiarism. The paper is still online. Journal gone silent and no longer replying to emails.
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.
