On Aug. 17, 2022, Nicki Tiffin received a notification that she had published a new study. The problem? She had never submitted an article to the journal in which the paper appeared.
A year later, despite efforts by Tiffin and others, the journal has not responded to retraction requests, and the article remains online. Further investigation by Retraction Watch has revealed other dysfunction at the journal, including falsely representing its editors and a schism from its founders and original sponsor.
The article, “Triumphs and improvement of Computational Bioinformatics in South Africa,” was published in June 2022 in the European Journal of Biomedical Informatics (EJBI).
Tiffin, a professor at the South African National Bioinformatics Institute at the University of the Western Cape, discovered that the new paper was a plagiarized version of an article she had published in 2016. That paper, “The Development of Computational Biology in South Africa: Successes Achieved and Lessons Learnt,” appeared in the journal PLOS Computational Biology and has been cited 13 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
In 2016, Tiffin was a professor at the University of Cape Town. Although she had no role in publishing the EJBI article, it lists her name as the sole author of the paper, as well as her University of Cape Town affiliation.
Continue reading One year later, bioinformatics journal with unclear leadership yet to retract plagiarized article
