plagiarism – Page 6 – Retraction Watch

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.

Journal of the paranormal has its first retraction

We should have seen this one coming. Or, maybe, they should have.

A journal dedicated to the study of psychics, the paranormal and related fringe research has its first retraction, according to the editor.

The Journal of Scientific Exploration says it detected plagiarism in a 2017 paper by Alejandro Parra, a well-known figure in the world of parapsychology — marking the first retraction from its pages.

The JSE publishes:

Irony alert: stolen voices, relative rip-off

We’re always on the lookout for papers with that fillip of irony that lets us wonder if the Great Comedian in the Sky enjoys our little project. This week, we found two such articles.

One involves a 2008 paper in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research titled “Examining Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis as One of the Main Views on the Relationship Between Language and Thought.” The author was Iman Tohidian, an Irani scholar. Except, in fact, the author was not Iman Tohidian, who appears to have what we might consider a rather appropriative view of the relationship between language and thought.

According to the retraction notice:

An author loses a fifth paper because it “bears the hallmarks of plagiarism”

A researcher in France has lost his fifth paper for plagiarism, this one a 2015 article on weakness in the elderly.

The study, “Identification of biological markers for better characterization of older subjects with physical frailty and sarcopenia,” appeared in Translational Neuroscience and came from a group in France led by Bertrand Fougère, of the Universitaire de Toulouse.

As we reported in 2019, Fougère had tallied previous retractions for plagiarism dating back to 2018. At the time, he told us:

‘Conference organizers have ignored this:’ How common is plagiarism and duplication in abstracts?

Harold “Skip” Garner has worn many hats over the course of his career, including plasma physicist, biologist, and administrator. One of his interests is plagiarism and duplication the scientific literature, and he and colleagues developed a tool called eTBLAST that compares text passages to what has already been published to flag potential overlap.

A new paper in Research Integrity and Peer Review by Garner and colleagues estimates “the prevalence of text overlap in biomedical conference abstracts.” We asked Garner some questions about the paper.

Retraction Watch (RW): You used a “text similarity engine” called eTBLAST. What is eTBLAST, and what does it do?

Here comes the judge, ready to plagiarize your paper

Not long ago, Amy Barnhorst opened an email from the editor of a journal to which she and a colleague submitted, but ultimately pulled, a paper on gun violence.

The cheery note — “thought you two might be interested to see what we came up with” — announced the publication of a recent article in the Journal of Health Service ~~Psychiatry~~ Psychology by a pair of authors. The title,“Collaborating with Patients on Firearms Safety in High-Risk Situations,” had an unpleasant whiff of irony to it — because the article was, in fact, Barnhorst’s own work. (Barnhorst told us she wanted to wait to name the paper until it was retracted, but the JHSP paper, identified by sleuth Elisabeth Bik, matches passages and descriptions tweeted by Barnhorst.)

As Barnhorst, the vice chair of psychiatry at UC Davis, and the director of the Bullet Points Project, a program to help clinicians prevent firearm injuries among their patients, tweeted:

In which a researcher named Das plagiarizes from another researcher named Das, one with 20 retractions

Sometimes things get pretty meta around here.

Exhibit A: The journal Current Medical Chemistry has retracted a 2012 paper for plagiarizing from a 2011 article — and the senior authors of each article share the same last name.

Ho hum, you say. But that name is one that might be familiar to RW readers.

Here’s the notice:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: