July 11, 2011

Doctoral Plagiarism Elsewhere - Copy, Shake, and Paste

Plagiarized doctoral theses are not only to be found in Germany. Janet Stemwedel reports on Adventures in Ethics and Science on the case of chemist Bengü Sezen. She links to Chemical & Engineering News with a report on the disseration and three other papers. She quotes:
The documents—an investigative report from Columbia and HHS’s subsequent oversight findings—show a massive and sustained effort by Sezen over the course of more than a decade to dope experiments, manipulate and falsify NMR and elemental analysis research data, and create fictitious people and organizations to vouch for the reproducibility of her results. ...
A notice in the Nov. 29, 2010, Federal Register states that Sezen falsified, fabricated, and plagiarized research data in three papers and in her doctoral thesis. Some six papers that Sezen had coauthored with Columbia chemistry professor Dalibor Sames have been withdrawn by Sames because Sezen’s results could not be replicated. ...
By the time Sezen received a Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 2005, under the supervision of Sames, her fraudulent activity had reached a crescendo, according to the reports. Specifically, the reports detail how Sezen logged into NMR spectrometry equipment under the name of at least one former Sames group member, then merged NMR data and used correction fluid to create fake spectra showing her desired reaction products.
Correction fluid? I thought that state-of-the-art fakes used Photoshop these days.

No comments:

Random Posts


  • Plagiarism: Words and ideas

    Mathieu Bouville Science and Engineering Ethics — doi: 10.1007/s11948-008-9057-6 Plagiarism is a crime against academy. It deceives readers, hurts plagiarized authors, and gets the plagiarist undeserved benefits. However, even though these arguments do show that copying other people’s intellectua... READ MORE>>

  • Plagiarism Accusation About Turkish Physicists

    Dr. Murat CivanerTurkiye Klinikleri J Med Ethics Year: 2008 Volume: 16 Issue:1  LETTER TO THE EDITOR In an article published in Nature dated Sept 6, 2007, it was stated that nearly 70 articles of 15 scientists from 18 Mart, Dicle and Mersin universities have been removed from a popular prepri... READ MORE>>

  • On plagiarism

    Physics in Medicine & Biology Editorial Simon Harris et al 2008 Phys. Med. Biol. 53 doi: 10.1088/0031-9155/53/5/E01>>> It is possible to plagiarize not only the work of others, but also one's own work through re-use of identical or nearly identical portions of manuscripts without ac... READ MORE>>

  • India to propose regulatory body to curb misconduct

    Nature news India is to consider creating a national body to investigate plagiarism and misconduct in science after a string of high-profile frauds. C. N. R. Rao, who heads the national science advisory committee, told Nature that he will discuss the proposal at his next meeting with Prime Minis... READ MORE>>

  • Author guidance on plagiarism and duplicate publication

    Maxine Clarke The Commentary in the current issue of Nature by Mounir Errami and Harold Garner, A tale of two citations (Nature 451, 397-399;2008), has predictably received a lot of attention. In a nutshell, the authors ask whether scientists are publishing more duplicate papers, and by their newl... READ MORE>>

  • Plagiarism and preprints

    Hilary Spencer In the Publishing in the New Millenium forum, Corie Lok asks about a recent paper in Nature by Mounir Errami and Harold Garner. The paper, A tale of two citations, suggests that there is a high level of duplicate papers being published. These papers may illustrate co-submission, pla... READ MORE>>

  • Something rotten in the state of scientific publishing

    By Jonathan M. Gitlin There is an interesting commentary in this week's Nature1 that takes a look at the subject of plagiarism within the scientific literature. It's certainly a contentious subject; from day one as an undergraduate it was drilled into us that there could be no greater sin than pla... READ MORE>>

.

.
.

Popular Posts