Category: plagiarism

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:

Continue reading Sports medicine researcher Paul McCrory requests another retraction

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.

Continue reading Was leading sports medicine researcher’s plagiarism ‘an isolated and unfortunate incident?’

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“This article has been retracted due to unlawful and indefensible breach of copyright.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.”

Continue reading ‘This is frankly insulting’: An author plagiarized by a journal editor speaks

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.

Continue reading Authors whose Springer Nature book was retracted for plagiarism solicit chapters for another

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’