Category: plagiarism

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The sequel involves a plea for forgiveness after the plagiarized paper was retracted, and a second allegation of stealing work – which has prompted the target of the plagiarism to wonder if a more serious response from the journal to the first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

A high-profile sports medicine researcher who earlier this week had an editorial he wrote while editor of the British Journal of Sports Medicine retracted has asked for another of his articles to be retracted, Retraction Watch has learned.

On Monday, we published a guest post by Steve Haake, whose work the former editor, Paul McCrory, had plagiarized. And on Wednesday, we reported that McCrory had called the plagiarism “isolated” but that sleuth Nick Brown had found at least two similar cases.

Of those two cases, McCrory, who has also served as an Australian Football League consultant, now tells Retraction Watch:

Earlier this week, we wrote about a case of plagiarism in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM) involving a highly credentialed researcher and Australian Football League consultant who’d cribbed roughly half of an article from another scholar. 

The researcher, Paul McCrory, has still not responded to our requests for comment. But in an email to Steve Haake, whose work McCrory lifted while editor of the BJSM, Paul McCrory said that the offense was: 

an isolated and unfortunate incident … 

That resulted from the uploading to the journals’ website of a “working draft” that “failed to appropriately cite your original and excellent work as the source of the manuscript.”

Unfortunate, yes. Isolated? That’s a bit less clear.

The British Journal of Sports Medicine retracted an editorial late last week by Paul McCrory, a former editor of the journal.

The publisher has joined the never-ending plagiarism euphemism parade. The retraction notice, which the journal embargoed until today despite having watermarked the editorial’s PDF “retracted” sometime Thursday or Friday, reads:

“This article has been retracted due to unlawful and indefensible breach of copyright. There was significant overlap with a previous publication, Physics, technology and the Olympics by Dr Steve Haake.”

If you had a book retracted for plagiarism, would you submit a book proposal to the same publisher? And if you were that publisher, would you entertain said pitch?

These, dear reader, are not idle questions.