plagiarism – Page 6 – Retraction Watch

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The chapter was retracted nearly 10 months after readers pointed out passages that had appeared to have been churned out by the fake paper generator Mathgen.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:

Pro-tip: Before submitting your manuscript, delete the plagiarism detection report text

It’s happened to all of us: You’re putting the final touches on your manuscript and run plagiarism detection software against it. Somehow, part of the software’s report ends up in your abstract — and neither you nor the peer reviewers nor the publishing team notices.

Well, it’s happened to one group of researchers, anyway.

Here’s one such passage, which appears right in “Identification of Selective Forwarding Attacks in Remote locator Network utilizing Adaptive Trust Framework,” a 2019 paper that was part of the IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering:

‘A fig leaf that doesn’t quite cover up’: Commission says philosopher engaged in ‘unacknowledged borrowings’ but not plagiarism

A philosopher with a double-digit retraction count did not commit plagiarism, according to a report released this weekend by France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), where the researcher is employed.

Magali Roques has had 11 papers retracted from seven different journals, most of which referred to plagiarism in their notices. But as Daily Nous, which was first to report on the CNRS findings and which has been writing about the case for some months, notes, the commission says Roques’ “writings contain ‘neither academic fraud nor plagiarism properly so called.’” The report differentiates “plagiarism properly so called” from “unacknowledged borrowings,” evidence of which the commission found.

According to the report commissioned by CNRS:

Elsevier retracts entire book that plagiarized heavily from Wikipedia

The periodic table is, as a recent book notes, a guide to nature’s building blocks. But the building blocks of said book appear to have been passages from Wikipedia.

The book, The Periodic Table: Nature’s Building Blocks: An Introduction to the Naturally Occurring Elements, Their Origins and Their Uses, was published by Elsevier last year. But in December, Tom Rauchfuss, of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “tipped off by an Finnish editor on Wikipedia,” alerted the authors and Elsevier about the apparent plagiarism from the online encyclopedia.

On January 6, an Elsevier representative told Rauchfuss:

University in Japan revokes doctorate for plagiarism of text, image

A researcher in Japan has been stripped of his doctorate after a university investigation found that his thesis contained seven lines of plagiarized text and an image pulled from the internet without attribution.

Takuma Hara received his PhD in medical sciences from Tsukuba University in March 2019, writing a thesis about a genetic mutation’s role in certain brain tumors. Allegations of misconduct against Hara first emerged on April 6, 2020, according to a report released by the school.

The university launched an investigation, interviewed Hara and found that the thesis contained two plagiarized snippets: a microscopy image was pulled from the web without attribution and, on page 6, Hara took seven lines of text from a 2016 paper, titled “Clinicopathological features of craniopharyngioma and the endoscopic endonasal surgery,” published in a Japanese journal called Progress in Neuro-Oncology. The university revoked Hara’s degree last month.

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