Category: plagiarism

Svein Åge K. Johnsen and Ingeborg Olsdatter Busterud Flagstad, of the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, have been trying to publish a manuscript on the psychology of green entrepreneurship.

In January 2021, they submitted it to the International Small Business Journal, a SAGE publication. The editors rejected it without sending it to peer review. So did The Journal of Entrepreneurship, another SAGE title. So Johnsen and Flagstad submitted it to Cogent Business & Management, a Taylor & Francis title.

And then, on December 25, as perhaps the worst Christmas present ever, they saw the paper published – by someone else.

Continue reading ‘I needed a publication in order to submit my thesis’: Author admits to stealing a manuscript

In September 2018, I wrote to the managing editor of FEBS Letters with my concerns about the extensive textual overlap between a 2011 article by Sonia A. Melo and Manel Esteller and other articles, including some that were not cited, such as a 2009 article in the Annual Review of Pathology by Yong Sun Lee and Anindya Dutta.

The Melo and Esteller article has received considerable attention, and has been cited more than 375 times. 

My initial efforts were met with a response that the iThenticate software they used only identified overlap with the published Melo and Esteller article.  I then had to guide the editor in the proper use of the program – including searching for partial overlap – that would lead to the finding of a 29% overlap with Lee and Dutta. 

On October 4, 2018, after seeing the results, the journal said they would look into the matter.  

In April 2019 I asked for an update. There was no answer.  

Continue reading ‘[T]he authors plagiarised a large amount of text, but…retractions should not be used as a tool to punish authors’

The authors of a paper in a cancer journal have retracted it after acknowledging they lifted parts of it from a thesis about an unrelated topic.

Here’s the retraction notice for “Regulation of RUNX3 Expression by DNA Methylation in Prostate Cancer,” originally published in July 2020 in Cancer Management and Research, a Dove title:

Continue reading Authors admit to stealing parts of a paper from a thesis on an unrelated subject

Talk about cultural misappropriation. 

A cultural studies journal has retracted a 2021 article on storytelling among the Quandamooka people in Australia for widespread plagiarism. 

The article, “Reconceptualising a Quandamooka Storyweave of language reclamation,” appeared in the International Journal of Cultural Studies in July and was written by a group led by Sandra Delaney, a scholar of indigenous languages in Australia. 

As the journal, a Sage title, makes clear, the article went through the typical course of peer review and, presumably, some editing – which somehow managed to miss plagiarised text from not one but at least eight sources. Three of those involved rip-offs from unpublished university theses, while the rest were from published articles. 

According to the retraction notice: 

Continue reading Paper on ‘language reclamation’ and decolonization plagiarized from eight papers, journal acknowledges

A physics journal has retracted a 2017 paper after learning that the authors had tried to pass off the ideas of others as their own. 

Normally, we’d just call that a case of plagiarism and move on. But in this case, the charge goes a bit deeper – less cribbing a few lines of the Principia and more claiming to have discovered gravity. 

“Exploring multiband tunneling for uncoupled particles: A polynomial view,” was written by a group of a half-dozen researchers in Mexico City, Uruguay and Cuba, where senior author Leo Diago-Cisneros sits on the faculty of the University of Havana. 

The paper, which appeared in the Journal of Applied Physics, purported to describe:

Continue reading Paper retracted because authors ‘misrepresented a published theoretical model as if they had found it’

For Pramod Sharma, the study of yoga tourism has proven to be a downward-facing dog. 

Last year, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Roorkee blocked Sharma – who posed as a legit yoga researcher but in reality stole other people’s work – from receiving his PhD after determining that his thesis was “plagiarized and lacks originality.” What’s more, according to the institution, a 2018 article by Sharma contained a “discrepancy in data…casting a doubt on the validity of the results.” 

Journals have now retracted five papers by Sharma, although earlier concerns about the work didn’t reach his PhD committee in time to prevent him from defending his thesis in 2019. 

We reviewed the IIT report on the Sharma case, and pulled out a couple of the choicest passages:

Continue reading Student of yoga tourism won’t get PhD as he earns five retractions

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:

Continue reading Plagiarism of a thesis earns authors a retraction — and a two-year-publishing ban

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.

Titled “Ethnic Characterization in Amalgamated People for Airport Security Using a Repository of Images and Pigeon-Inspired Optimization (PIO) Algorithm for the Improvement of Their Results,” the material was ostensibly written by a group at Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez led by Alberto Ochoa-Zezzatti. It appeared in “Applications of Hybrid Metaheuristic Algorithms for Image Processing,” which belongs to the 982-volume (and counting) Studies in Computational Intelligence series. 

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: 

Continue reading Scientist blames grad student for gibberish book chapter — a charge she calls ‘crazy’