Category: plagiarism

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.

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: 

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: 

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: 

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?

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: 

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: