plagiarism – Page 9 – Retraction Watch

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

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:

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

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:

How a plagiarized eye image in the NEJM was discovered

The Images in Clinical Medicine section of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is prime real estate for physicians and others wanting to share a compelling picture with their colleagues. But earlier this month, an eye specialist in Michigan saw double when he looked at the Dec. 5, 2019, installment of the feature.

Depicted was a picture from a pair of eye specialists in India who claimed to have seen a case of a person who’d suffered retinal bleeding after having been struck in the eye by a tennis ball:

Political science prof up to five retractions after she “carelessly uses parts of diverse sources”

A professor of political science at the University of Porto in Portugal has had at least five papers retracted for plagiarism.

Or, as one journal put it, Teresa Cierco “carelessly uses parts of diverse sources.”

Cierco’s areas of research include Kosovo, Macedonia, and Timor-Leste. The retractions, for papers published in 2013 and 2014, began in 2013, with three happening this year.

Cierco told Retraction Watch that she now realizes that she “did things wrong and tried to correct them.”

Pass the salt…off as your own? Plagiarism, meet salinity.

A group of physicists in Morocco have lost a 2018 paper over plagiarism and other concerns.

The article, “A 2D fluid motion model of the estuarine water circulation: Physical analysis of the salinity stratification in the Sebou estuary,” appeared in European Physics Journal Plus. The first author, Soufiane Haddout, is listed as being at Ibn Tofail University in Kenitra.

According to the notice:

Controversial AI expert admits to plagiarism, blames hectic schedule

People scrolling through Siraj Raval’s Twitter feed, or watching his videos or paying money to hear his insights on “data literacy” likely expect that what they’re hearing are original pearls from an AI expert. Apparently, they shouldn’t.

Raval has admitted to stealing large amounts of text in a recently published paper on “neural qubit,” which he says he has removed from his website (although it seems to still be available), along with a YouTube video related to the work.

In an Oct. 13 tweet Raval copped to the misconduct:

Springer Nature took eleven months to retract a plagiarized book, then made it disappear without a trace

A year ago today, Jennifer Powers, a co-author of a 2009 paper wrote to Springer Nature to alert the publisher to the fact that Tropical Dry Deciduous Forest: Research Trends and Emerging Features, a 2017 textbook by J. S. Singh and R.K. Chaturvedi, had plagiarized her work, and the work of others. A publisher representative responded six days later, saying they would look into the matter.

Then, for five months, crickets.

On January 23 of this year, Powers, of the University of Minnesota, sent another message asking for a progress report. Several days later, a Springer Nature staffer wrote to say they would provide an answer by mid-February.

Mid-February came and went, and the co-author sent another reminder, as did Jesse Lasky, of Penn State, another of the authors who said his work had been plagiarized. Back from Springer came this message:

Critic up to 18 retractions for plagiarism

H. L. Mencken once wrote that “It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.” One wonders what linguistic Hell Mencken would have divined for Robert Cardullo.

Up to 19% plagiarism is just fine, journal tells authors

Apparently, you can be a little bit pregnant. We’ll explain.

The other day we received an email from a researcher tipping us off to a remarkable admission from a journal in Pakistan about how much (as in, precisely how much) plagiarism it was willing to accept in its pages.

The publication, the Punjab University Journal of Mathematics, had approached the researcher (whom we’re not identifying, at their request) asking them to be a reviewer. When the scientist demurred, the following message arrived:

Compression plagiarism: An “under-recognized variety” that software will miss

If you’re interested in plagiarism in the scholarly literature nowadays, you’ve probably come across the name Michael Dougherty. Dougherty’s efforts to root out plagiarism has led to dozens of retractions, including several by a prominent priest. In a new paper in Argumentation, Dougherty, author of the recent book Correcting the Scholarly Record for Research Integrity: In the Aftermath of Plagiarism, has coined a new term: “compression plagiarism.” We asked him more about the phenomenon, which Dougherty says “is invisible to unsuspecting readers and immune to anti-plagiarism software.”

Retraction Watch (RW): You define a term that is new to us: Compression plagiarism. What is compression plagiarism, and why is it particularly problematic? Continue reading Compression plagiarism: An “under-recognized variety” that software will miss

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