When Pharmacy Practice found out it had been victimized by plagiarists, it apparently took the news personally — and to heart. In an elaborate statement with more than a dozen references — but not one to the plagiarizing work — the journal lashed out against the behavior of word thieves, and described the discovery as … Continue reading Journal that “suffered” from plagiarism purges itself
It’s always amusing to see how far a journal will bend over backward to avoid coming out and calling something “plagiarism.” We’ve got two notices for you that exemplify the phenomenon, which we discussed in our Lab Times column last year. The first, an article about apartheid, was presented at a student conference and published in the Polyvocia: … Continue reading Mistaken punctuation, misreferencing, and other euphemisms for plagiarism
Sometimes plagiarism can be tricky to catch when an article has to be translated before publication. That seems to be the case for two papers out of a hospital in Canakkale, Turkey, that discussed results of two different kinds of heart surgery. Here’s the retraction notice for “The effects of 21 and 23 milimeter aortic valve … Continue reading The tell-tale heart: Cardiovascular surgeons notch two retractions for plagiarism
Although most of what Alanis Morissette sang about in her hit song “Ironic” wasn’t irony at all, had she included a line or two about Angela Adrian she would have nailed it. Adrian is an expert in intellectual property law, a former editor of the International Journal of Intellectual Property Management, a legal scholar whose … Continue reading Intellectual property lawyer loses papers for … plagiarism
Here’s a new category for us: Poetry. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, a comparative studies journal, has retracted a paper on gender roles in Middle Eastern poetry due to plagiarism. Nizar Kabbani was a famed Syrian poet who wrote frankly about feminism, love, and sex. He’s well worth a read, … Continue reading Poetry, politics, plagiarism, and erotics add up to a retraction
Sometimes plagiarism, like an onion, has layers. That appears to be the case in a paper brought to our attention by sharp-eyed reader Vladimir Baulin, whose work was copied in a 2006 paper that Journal of Biological Physics retracted for plagiarism. But you can’t keep a good thief down: the plagiarizing authors just popped up in a new … Continue reading Recursive plagiarism? Researchers may have published a duplicate of a study retracted for plagiarism
Retractions have arrived in the case of Peter Nijkamp, a leading Dutch economist accused of duplication and plagiarism. The Review of Economic Analysis has removed two of Nijkamp’s articles for self-plagiarism. According to the NRC Handelsblad website (courtesy of Google translate): The affair university economics professor Peter Nijkamp and his PhD student Karima Kourtit has … Continue reading Retractions arrive in plagiarism scandal involving economist Nijkamp
Pro tip: If you’re going to write about stalking, it’s probably best if you don’t get too close to your material. That’s a lesson a group of researchers in Italy was forced to learn the hard way. They lost their 2013 article in Medicine, Science and the Law for being too similar to a 2008 … Continue reading Don’t walk this way: Stalking paper halted for plagiarism
Studies in Conflict & Terrorism has retracted a 2013 article about Boko Haram, the Nigerian extremist group accused of massacres and, recently, the kidnapping of approximately 276 schoolgirls in that country. Here’s the notice, which pretty much says it all:
The Journal of Evidence-Based Complementary Medicine (JEBCAM) has retracted a 2013 review on probiotics by an author from Turkey who patched the paper together from a variety of other sources — and then appears to have reused his own work elsewhere without attribution. The article was written by Öner Özdemir, a pediatric allergy specialist at … Continue reading Plagiarism spells demise of complementary medicine paper