Category: plagiarism

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 (Barnhorst told us she wanted to wait to name the paper until it was retracted, but the JHSP paper, identified by sleuth Elisabeth Bik, matches passages and descriptions tweeted by Barnhorst.)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: 

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.)

Following an investigation prompted by a whistleblower, a university in Australia has recommended that one of its researchers retract two papers, Retraction Watch has learned.

The reviews, “Cryptography and State-of-the-art Techniques” and “An Advanced Survey on Cloud Computing and State-of-the-art Research Issues,” were both published in 2012 in the International Journal of Computer Science Issues (IJCSI). In a May 20 letter to the whistleblower in the case, the research integrity officer at Edith Cowan University in Perth wrote: 

After more than four years of doing, well, not much, evidently, Scientific Reports — a Springer Nature title — has retracted a paper which plagiarized from the bachelor’s thesis of a Hungarian mathematician. 

The article, “Modified box dimension and average weighted receiving time on the weighted fractal networks,” was purportedly written by a group of researchers from China led by Meifeng Dai, of the Nonlinear Scientific Research Center at Jiangsu University.

Except it wasn’t. As the retraction notice states: