Turkish Professors Uncover Plagiarism in Papers Posted on Physics Server -THE CHRONICLE of HIGHER EDUCATION

Aisha Labi

Dozens of academic papers containing apparently plagiarized work have been removed by moderators from arXiv, the popular preprint server where many physicists post their work before publication, Nature (subscription required) is reporting. According to the article, 67 papers by 15 physicists at four Turkish universities were pulled after an examination of their content revealed that they “plagiarize the works of others or contain inappropriate levels of overlap with earlier articles.”.>>>

Reply (JHEP Journal)

----- Original Message -----
From: "JHEP Journal"
To: "ODTU Rektor"
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2007 7:14 PM
Subject: Ethics Committee

Dear Professor Akbulut,

We have looked to your letter regarding plagiarism.

First of all, in matters of plagiarism it is the injured party that must take action. We are not involved in administering justice.

The authors of the paper in question seem to cite the articles from which they copy sentences or paragraphs. This weakens the case.

It may be that the paper should not have been published and that the refereerred. Unfortunately weak papers get sometimes published.This may happen when the work is in a rather minor subject or not in anactive and competitive field. If the results are oustanding or contradict well known physics this would not happen.

Therefore we fear that we cannot help you in this case.

Sincerely yours,
JHEP Journal

Letter to Editors

From: "ODTU Rektor"
To: jhep-eo@jhep.sissa.it
Subject: Ethics Committee
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 10:22:46 +0200

Dear Editors,

We are writing this message concerning a serious plagiarism case that we have come across with in a paper published by JHEP. First of all, we would like to express our disappointment in finding out that it was completely unnoticed by your Editorial Office and Refereeing Process. The details are provided in the pdf file we attached to this message with the relevant comments inserted in appropriate places.

The authors of this article are two graduate students of our University, Department of Physics, METU, Ankara. They have submitted 46 papers to the physics ArXiv, in 23 months and some of these have already been published by journals similar to yours. These people are going through an investigation led by the Ethics Committee of the University and will, most probaby be expelled from METU. However, it is noteworthy to mention that in their defence, they use the paper mentioned below as 'evidence' that their work is 'of the highest quality since it has been published by one of the leading journals of its area'. Needless to say, JHEP's integrity is in question here and we strongly believe that it is also JHEP's responsibility to react urgently and help us clear out this issue.

We are looking forward to hearing from at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely,
Prof.Dr. Ural Akbulut
President