Category: plagiarism

Not long ago, it came to my attention that a 2016 paper by my students and me, “Measuring Semantic Similarity Of Words Using Concept Networks,”  had been plagiarized, verbatim. The offenders had added two words to the title, which now read: “A Novel Methodology For Measuring Semantic Similarity Of Words Using Concept Networks.” Their article was published in the journal Webology, which has been delisted from Scopus, Elsevier’s abstract and citation database. My first impulse was to ignore the transgression, but I asked the question what to do on a closed mailing list read by former colleagues:

I know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I’m sufficiently flattered, and I know that even a Harvard President was let go for lesser forms of plagiarism, but Integral University of Lucknow is not exactly Harvard. We may already live in a post-truth world (if Trump gets reelected it’s proof positive that we do) and I don’t quite have it in me to destroy the futures of some random students (or perhaps faculty?) in India. The online journal where it appeared is published in Teheran, and does not appear on Beall’s list of predatory journals. What to do?

The responses ran 10-0 in favor of doing something. Here is a typical one: 

Neri Oxman’s problems may be getting worse.

The researcher, who has become embroiled in plagiarism accusations following her billionaire husband’s push to depose the president of Harvard for plagiarizing in her thesis, appears to have lifted about 100 words in her thesis from an article that has been plagiarized before.

Last week, Business Insider reported that Oxman “plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation…including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.” Oxman, who earned her PhD at MIT and was later a professor there until 2020, has since acknowledged some citation errors.

The new allegation is that Oxman’s thesis also lifted about 100 words from a 2000 article in Physics World without quoting or citing the piece. (See a comparison here using the Vroniplag similarity detector set at a minimum of six consecutive words of overlap. The 2000 article text is on the left, and part of the thesis is on the right.) That article was plagiarized in 2005 by a then-leading sports medicine expert, Paul McCrory, who resigned from a key post in 2022 following revelations of that and other pilfering. McCrory has now had more than ten papers retracted.

A paper that claimed to have developed a new method to predict acid drainage from mines was not so novel after all, according to one of its authors.

In a series of emails to Retraction Watch, Dulian Zeqiraj of the Polytechnic University of Tirana, Albania, admitted to lifting figures and tables from other articles and said he might also have left some “text as it is in original.”

His paper, “A Novel Stochastic Approach for Modeling Acid Mine Drainage in Three Dimensions,” was published November 17 in Process Safety and Environmental Protection, an Elsevier title.

That the article managed to clear peer review is astonishing, said Muhammad Muniruzzaman, a senior scientist at the Geological Survey of Finland in Espoo, who discovered last week that Zeqiraj’s team had plagiarized his work. 

A professor in France who plagiarized extensively in a review article and then blamed the offense on an undisclosed medical writer will lose the publication, Retraction Watch has learned.

“We have decided to retract this paper,” Yi-Xiang Wang, editor-in-chief of Quantitative Imaging in Medicine and Surgery, told us by email.

The move comes one day after a Retraction Watch exclusive describing how the professor, Romaric Loffroy of CHU Dijon Bourgogne, claimed he had not written the offending paper despite being listed as its first and corresponding author. Instead, Loffroy put the blame on an alleged medical writer.

The retraction will be Loffroy’s first. He did not immediately respond to our request for comments.

Two years after it was quietly retracted “due to plagiarism,” a paper by a prominent researcher in Latvia has set the country’s media ablaze, drawing comments from, among others, the minister of education and science and the rector of a leading university. 

The plagiarized paper came to public attention in March when the Latvian magazine Ir published serious allegations against Maris Klavins, a professor and former dean at the University of Latvia. The allegations concern “possible fraud” in an EU-funded project headed by Klavins and include not only plagiarism but data falsification, budget irregularities and suspicious cash payments.

According to Ir, the Latvian police have opened a criminal investigation into the case. Klavins told the magazine he has not been charged in the matter. 

In an email to Retraction Watch, Klavins called the allegations “lies” and said the “person responsible” for “my defamation and persecution” was his former PhD student Dmitrijs Porsnovs.

Last September, a researcher at a university in Bangladesh emailed a journal about a paper he had published in 2019. He made a stark admission: the paper contained plagiarism, said Sorif Hossain, a lecturer in statistics at Noakhali Science and Technology University, who called for the article to be promptly retracted.

But the paper remained in place. Only after Retraction Watch contacted the European Journal of Environment and Public Health (EJEPH) last week did it issue a retraction.