plagiarism – Page 5 – Retraction Watch

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

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:

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

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:

IEEE retracts plagiarized paper after Retraction Watch inquiries

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has retracted a paper it published in 2006 that was identical to another paper it published that same year.

We learned of the two identical papers — both titled “Delay-dependent robust stability of uncertain discrete singular time-delay systems,” one published in the Proceedings of the 2006 American Control Conference, the other in the Proceedings of the 6th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation (WCICA) — from a reader in early October.

We alerted IEEE to the identical papers on October 7. The next day, a spokesperson said she was initiating an inquiry. And on November 10, the spokesperson sent us this statement:

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

Enamul Haque, whose master’s thesis was plagiarized by other authors

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:

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

Guillaume Cabanac

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:

When ‘out of print’ really means ‘retracted’

Image by eberhard grossgasteiger from Pixabay

We’ve taken publishers to task for disappearing articles without providing readers an explanation for the move. Turns out, they do the same with books, too.

In September 2014, Springer Nature published “Beekeeping for Poverty Alleviation and Livelihood Security Vol 1: Technological Aspects of Beekeeping,” described as:

Paper that ripped off a PhD thesis is retracted

The authors of a 2021 article on “cognitive radio” have lost the paper after the journal learned that they’d pilfered the work from a doctoral dissertation.

“A Cluster-Based Distributed Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Techniques in Cognitive Radio” was published in the proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Innovative Data Communication Technologies and Application, which was held in Coimbatore, India. The proceedings was a supplement to Innovative Data Communication Technologies and Application, a Springer Nature title.

Cognitive radio, according to Wikipedia, “can intelligently detect whether any portion of the spectrum is in use, and can temporarily use it without interfering with the transmissions of other users.”

Publisher investigating all of an author’s papers following reporting by Retraction Watch

Less than two weeks after Retraction Watch reported that an abstract from 2019 included what appeared to be text from plagiarism detection software, the publisher has subjected the paper to an expression of concern and is investigating all of the lead author’s papers.

The paper,”Identification of Selective Forwarding Attacks in Remote locator Network utilizing Adaptive Trust Framework,” appeared as part of an IOP Conference Series. Nick Wise, an engineering graduate student at Cambridge, flagged the incident on Twitter, which IOP Publishing told us they had not yet heard about.

Today, IOP Publishing spokesperson Rachael Harper told Retraction Watch:

Obama intelligence official shortchanged grad student in 2015 book

A top intelligence official in the Obama administration failed to adequately credit a research assistant for a 2015 book but eventually relented after the grad student refused to back down about the slight, Retraction Watch has learned.

Gregory Treverton, who served as chairman of President Obama’s National Intelligence Council, wrote “National Intelligence and Science: Beyond the Great Divide in Analysis and Policy” with Wilhelm Agrell, a Swedish political scientist. At the time, Treverton was at the RAND Corporation, and he enlisted the help of Tyler Lippert, then a student at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and a RAND analyst.

According to Lippert, Treverton used extensive passages of text that Lippert provided to him with no acknowledgment that Lippert had done the work. Emails between Lippert and Treverton obtained by Retraction Watch show an increasingly acrimonious exchange between the two scholars.

University orders PhD supervisor to retract paper that plagiarized his student

A researcher at the University of Newcastle in Australia plagiarized a former student’s thesis, according to a summary of a university investigation obtained by Retraction Watch.

Andy Eamens, who at least until recently was an agronomy researcher at Newcastle, published a paper in 2019 that included work by Kate Hutcheon, whose PhD work he supervised, without any credit. Hutcheon, who earned her PhD in 2017, contacted the journal, Agronomy, an MDPI title, in November 2019.

The journal, Hutcheon told Retraction Watch, “forwarded a copy of my complaint directly to my PhD supervisor (without my consent). Thankfully they also forwarded me a copy of his response.” In what we found a bit confusing, to say the least, Eamens wrote, in part:

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