Category: plagiarism

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.)

Continue reading A two-year drama: The anatomy of a retraction request

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: 

Continue reading University recommends retraction of two computing papers for plagiarism

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: 

Continue reading An author realized a paper had plagiarized his thesis. It took the journal four years to retract it.

Earlier this month, we broke the story of a misconduct inquiry against Mark Auslander, the director of the Michigan State University Museum in East Lansing. (That story was picked up by a number of news outlets in Michigan.)

Auslander was found guilty by a university committee of having plagiarized, falsified data and committed other offenses stemming from his involvement in the repatriation to Bolivia of a 500-year-old mummy.  The claimant in the case was William Lovis, a professor emeritus of anthropology at MSU and curator emeritus of anthropology for the museum.

According to the report: 

Continue reading Michigan State museum director “vigorously” denies “virtually all” of university panel findings against him

An investigation into the director of the museum at Michigan State University has found him guilty of research misconduct and other behavior stemming from his meddling in efforts to repatriate a 500-year-old mummy of a young girl that came to the school from South America in the late 19th century. 

A committee at the East Lansing institution determined that Mark Auslander, an anthropologist and historian misappropriated the work of other scholars, fabricated data and committed other misconduct in his handling of the mummy matter, which made headlines last year.

Although the case involves several years of misbehavior, at its core are two main events: a repatriation ceremony in Washington, D.C. for the relic, and an official letter in which Auslander, as director of the museum published the ill-gotten work. 

According to a summary of the report provided to Retraction Watch which is consistent with official communications viewed by us: 

Continue reading Michigan State committee finds misconduct by museum head in celebrated mummy case

A group of researchers in France has lost a 2019 paper in Cell Calcium because one of the authors took, um, a bit too much inspiration for the work from a manuscript he’d reviewed for another publication. 

The article, “TRPV6 calcium channel regulation, downstream pathways, and therapeutic targeting in cancer,” was written by a team from the Laboratory of Excellence Ion Channel Science and Therapeutics at the University of Lille. The senior author of the paper was V’yacheslav Lehen’kyi.

Or, maybe it was John Stewart, of Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. 

As the retraction notice states: 

Continue reading Author ‘still shocked by the blatancy of the plagiarism and by the stupidity’ after a reviewer steals his work