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.
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.
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 PsychiatryPsychology 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 (Barnhorst told us she wanted to wait to name the paper until it was retracted, but the JHSP paper, identified by sleuth Elisabeth Bik, matches passages and descriptions tweeted by Barnhorst.)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:
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.
Nine strikes in a row in bowling is called a “golden turkey.” So what do you call 10 papers on poultry pulled at once for plagiarism?
We first wrote about Sajid Umar in July 2018, when he’d lost a 2016 article in Scientifica for plagiarism and other sins, and then again earlier this summer when he notched two more retractions from Poultry Science for “grave mistakes.”
Now, the World’s Poultry Science Journal, a Taylor & Francis title, has pulled 10 more of Umar’s articles — bringing his total to 14, by our count. According to the retraction notice for the 2017 paper “Mycoplasmosis in poultry: update on diagnosis and preventive measures”:
A trio of speech researchers in India has lost a 2020 paper for a trifecta of malpractice: plagiarism, self-plagiarism (of a previously retracted article, no less!) and falsification of data.
The article, “Speech enhancement method using deep learning approach for hearing-impaired listeners,” appeared in January in Health Informatics Journal, a Sage title.
A study on a wireless communication algorithm was retracted for being an exact duplicate of a paper submitted to a separate journal last year — but the authors were different and it’s unclear how they got hold of it.
For more than a decade, I have been working with colleagues to request retractions from editors and publishers for plagiarizing articles, mostly in my discipline of philosophy and related fields. But almost two years ago I requested a retraction from a seismology journal. Since I have no training in the science of earthquakes, how did I get involved?
In June 2017 I read an article on Retraction Watch, “Plagiarism costs author five papers in five different journals” involving a researcher in civil engineering. The unrelated subject matters represented by each of the journals surprised me, as they involved refugee studies, educational philosophy, disaster medicine, and life quality studies. These are important disciplines, but they are not obviously related to each other, nor to civil engineering.
A year later I wondered whether any more retractions had appeared for that same researcher, and I came across an unretracted 2011 article by that researcher in the journal Earthquake Science. After two minutes of online searching I discovered it was a near-identical copy of a 2002 article by different authors in the Elsevier journal Engineering Structures. My lack of training in seismology was not an impediment to making this determination; the only major differences between the two articles were the titles and the authors of record. (The detailed tables, figures, photos, data visualizations, and paragraphs were identical but for minor elements.)
