Journal Editors' Reactions to Word of Plagiarism? Largely Silence - THE CHRONICLE of HIGHER EDUCATION

Tom Bartlett

Lior Shamir was surprised to learn that one of his papers had been plagiarized. He was even more surprised to learn that it had been plagiarized, by his count, 21 times.

But what really astonished him is that no one seemed to care.

In July, Mr. Shamir, an assistant professor of computer science at Lawrence Technological University, near Detroit, received an anonymous e-mail signed "Prof. Against Plagiarism." That's how he found out that multiple paragraphs from a paper he had presented at a 2006 conference, titled "Human Perception-Based Color Segmentation Using Fuzzy Logic," also appeared in a 2010 paper by two professors in Iran. There was no question of coincidence—the wording was identical—and his paper wasn't even cited.

Curious, he started to poke around some more. One of the Iranian professors, Ali Moghani, a professor at the Institute for Color Science and Technology, in Tehran, appeared to have copied parts of the paper in eight different publications. (Mr. Moghani did not respond to a request for comment.) But he wasn't the only one. The more Mr. Shamir looked, the more he found. Those 21 papers had 26 authors, all of whom had published Mr. Shamir's work under their names, without credit.

It's not as if the paper was a central part of his academic work. In fact, he had forgotten about it until he got the anonymous e-mail.

Now, though, he was intrigued, and more than a little annoyed. So he started contacting journals, indexing services, conference organizers. He sent, by his estimate, about 30 e-mails. He expected that the papers, once it was shown that they had been plagiarized, would be retracted. Maybe he would get an explanation, or an apology, or a response of some kind.

In fact, he received only a couple of replies.

Among those he did receive was a reply from Mohammad Reza Darafsheh, the other Iranian academic. Mr. Darafsheh, a professor of mathematics at the University of Tehran, wrote that "[a]bout the overlap of some sentences in chapter 4 of our paper with yours we feel sorry." But he added that it was "only about one page." The email ended with an offer to collaborate with Mr. Shamir in the future.

When contacted by The Chronicle, Mr. Darafsheh wrote in an e-mail that only one paragraph was identical to the original, and that it had "no scientific value." After it was pointed out to Mr. Darafsheh that, in truth, about 400 words of the eight-page paper appeared to have been copied directly from Mr. Shamir's paper, he insisted that there had been no copying, and that it was merely a "co-accident."

Mr. Darafsheh and Mr. Moghani's paper was published in the Italian Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics. The Chronicle contacted the editor, Piergiulio Corsini, who in turn asked Violeta Leoreanu Fotea, a professor of mathematics at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, in Romania, to investigate. After reviewing both papers, she wrote that she could "not say that Darafsheh and Moghani have plagiarized the work of Shamir."

After The Chronicle e-mailed her multiple examples of just such copying from the paper, Ms. Leoreanu Fotea acknowledged that it was "a lot of identical text," and said Mr. Corsini would decide how to handle the matter. But he wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle that he was not sure what decision he was supposed to make. "The paper has been already published, and I cannot cancel it," he wrote. "I'm sorry for what happened."

Later, Ms. Leoreanu Fotea wrote to say that "two lines on this unpleasant episode of plagiarism" would appear in a future edition of the journal.

'Deny the Undeniable'

In 2009, another paper that borrowed heavily from Mr. Shamir's without credit was published in the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Emerging Trends in Engineering & Technology. One of the co-authors was Preeti Bajaj, president of the G.H. Raisoni College of Engineering, in India, who was also chair of the conference where the plagiarized paper was presented.

That plagiarism was first reported this past September by the journal Nature India, in which Ms. Bajaj acknowledged that portions were copied but blamed a graduate assistant who was a coauthor of the paper. She told Nature India that the assistant had been fired. What she did not mention was that the paper was published again this year in the Journal of Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing. In an e-mail to The Chronicle, she wrote in uncertain English that as a co-author, "I'm guilty but I didn't knew my student will do so." In a follow-up message, she asserted that the "research truth can be known to only those who understands and work on the technology." Ms. Bajaj did not respond to a request for further explanation.

"Surreal" was how Mr. Shamir characterized Ms. Bajaj's defense. Indeed, the response in general has bewildered him. He says he's been greeted either by silence or by attempts to "ridiculously deny the undeniable."

That reaction is echoed by Gerald Koocher, editor of the journal Ethics & Behavior and co-author of Responding to Research Wrongdoing: A User-Friendly Guide. He found Mr. Darafsheh's argument that only one page had been copied laughable. As for Ms. Bajaj's insisting that she didn't know what her graduate assistant had done, Mr. Koocher was unpersuaded: "What does it say about your scholarly integrity that you don't vet what your students write?"

Regarding the behavior of journal editors, he wonders whether there is a reluctance to investigate because doing so might reflect poorly on them. "If you admit that your journal published plagiarized material, you might feel that you have not adequately protected the journal," he says. Of course, Mr. Koocher says, that's no excuse.

At least one investigation continues. The American Institute of Physics, which published a paper co-written by Mr. Moghani in its conference proceedings, says it's looking into allegations of plagiarism. (In this case, Mr. Moghani's abstract is nearly identical to Mr. Shamir's.)

The institute did not respond to two e-mails Mr. Shamir wrote, but it did respond to an inquiry from The Chronicle. Mark Cassar, publisher of journals and technical publications at the institute, wrote that it "regrets not responding to Prof. Shamir in a timely fashion."

Mr. Shamir sees a larger danger here: "Science is based on sharing, and the sharing of results and ideas is protected by strict and welldefined ethics guidelines. If editors allow violating these guidelines, this whole sensitive structure might collapse."

So why did this one rather minor publication attract so many plagiarists? Mr. Shamir finds that yet another mystery. "It wasn't even such a good paper," he says.

Retracted Science and the Retraction Index

Ferric C. Fang, Editor in Chief

Arturo Casadevall, Editor in Chief

R. P. Morrison, Editor

Infection and Immunity

Articles may be retracted when their findings are no longer considered trustworthy due to scientific misconduct or error, they plagiarize previously published work, or they are found to violate ethical guidelines. Using a novel measure that we call the “retraction index,” we found that the frequency of retraction varies among journals and shows a strong correlation with the journal impact factor. Although retractions are relatively rare, the retraction process is essential for correcting the literature and maintaining trust in the scientific process.>>>

Science publishing: The trouble with retractions - NATURE

A surge in withdrawn papers is highlighting weaknesses in the system for handling them.

Richard Van Noorden

This week, some 27,000 freshly published research articles will pour into the Web of Science, Thomson Reuters' vast online database of scientific publications. Almost all of these papers will stay there forever, a fixed contribution to the research literature. But 200 or so will eventually be flagged with a note of alteration such as a correction. And a handful — maybe five or six — will one day receive science's ultimate post-publication punishment: retraction, the official declaration that a paper is so flawed that it must be withdrawn from the literature.

It is reassuring that retractions are so rare, for behind at least half of them lies some shocking tale of scientific misconduct — plagiarism, altered images or faked data — and the other half are admissions of embarrassing mistakes. But retraction notices are increasing rapidly. In the early 2000s, only about 30 retraction notices appeared annually. This year, the Web of Science is on track to index more than 400 (see 'Rise of the retractions') — even though the total number of papers published has risen by only 44% over the past decade. 

Perhaps surprisingly, scientists and editors broadly welcome the trend. "I don't think there's any doubt that we're detecting more fraud, and that systems are more responsive to misconduct. It's become more acceptable for journals to step in," says Nicholas Steneck, a research ethicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. But as retractions become more commonplace, stresses that have always existed in the system are starting to show more vividly.

When the UK-based Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) surveyed editors' attitudes to retraction two years ago, it found huge inconsistencies in policies and practices between journals, says Elizabeth Wager, a medical writer in Princes Risborough, UK, who is chair of COPE. That survey led to retraction guidelines that COPE published in 2009. But it's still the case, says Wager, that "editors often have to be pushed to retract".

Other frustrations include opaque retraction notices that don't explain why a paper has been withdrawn, a tendency for authors to keep citing retracted papers long after they've been red-flagged (see 'Withdrawn papers live on') and the fact that many scientists hear 'retraction' and immediately think 'misconduct' — a stigma that may keep researchers from coming forward to admit honest errors.

Perfection may be too much to expect from any system that has to deal with human error in all its messiness. As one journal editor told Wager, each retraction is "painfully unique".

But as more retractions hit the headlines, some researchers are calling for ways to improve their handling. Suggested reforms include better systems for linking papers to their retraction notices or revisions, more responsibility on the part of journal editors and, most of all, greater transparency and clarity about mistakes in research.

The reasons behind the rise in retractions are still unclear. "I don't think that there is suddenly a boom in the production of fraudulent or erroneous work," says John Ioannidis, a professor of health policy at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, who has spent much of his career tracking how medical science produces flawed results.

In surveys, around 1–2% of scientists admit to having fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once (D. Fanelli PLoS ONE 4, e5738; 2009). But over the past decade, retraction notices for published papers have increased from 0.001% of the total to only about 0.02%. And, Ioannidis says, that subset of papers is "the tip of the iceberg" — too small and fragmentary for any useful conclusions to be drawn about the overall rates of sloppiness or misconduct.

Instead, it is more probable that the growth in retractions has come from an increased awareness of research misconduct, says Steneck. That's thanks in part to the setting up of regulatory bodies such as the US Office of Research Integrity in the Department of Health and Human Services. These ensure greater accountability for the research institutions, which, along with researchers, are responsible for detecting mistakes.

The growth also owes a lot to the emergence of software for easily detecting plagiarism and image manipulation, combined with the greater number of readers that the Internet brings to research papers. In the future, wider use of such software could cause the rate of retraction notices to dip as fast as it spiked, simply because more of the problematic papers will be screened out before they reach publication. On the other hand, editors' newfound comfort with talking about retraction may lead to notices coming at an even greater rate.

"Norms are changing all the time," says Steven Shafer, editor-in-chief of the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia, who has participated in two major misconduct investigations — one of which involved 11 journals and led to the retraction of some 90 papers.

It's none of your damn business!

But willingness to talk about retractions is hardly universal. "There are a lot of publishers and a lot of journal editors who really don't want people to know about what's going on at their publications," says New York City-based writer Ivan Oransky, executive editor at Reuters Health. In August 2010, Oransky co-founded the blog Retraction Watch with Adam Marcus, managing editor at Anesthesiology News. Since its launch, Oransky says, the site has logged 1.1 million page views and has covered more than 200 retractions.

In one memorable post, the reporters describe ringing up one editor, L. Henry Edmunds at the Annals of Thoracic Surgery, to ask about a paper withdrawn from his journal (see go.nature.com/ubv261). "It's none of your damn business!" he told them. Edmunds did not respond to Nature 's request to talk for this article.

The posts on Retraction Watch show how wildly inconsistent retractions practices are from one journal to the next. Notices range from informative and transparent to deeply obscure. A typically unhelpful example of the genre would be: "This article has been withdrawn at the request of the authors in order to eliminate incorrect information." Oransky argues that such obscurity leads readers to assume misconduct, as scientists making an honest retraction would, presumably, try to explain what was at fault.

To Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, there are two obvious reasons for obscure retraction notices: "fear and work."

The fear factor, says Wager, is because publishers are very frightened of being sued. "They are incredibly twitchy about publishing anything that could be defamatory," she says.

'Work' refers to the phenomenal effort required to sort through authorship disputes, concerns about human or animal subjects, accusations of data fabrication and all the other ways a paper can go wrong. "It takes dozens or hundreds of hours of work to get to the bottom of what's going on and really understand it," says Shafer. Because most journal editors are scientists or physicians working on a voluntary basis, he says, that effort comes out of their research and clinical time.

But the effort has to be made, says Steneck. "If you don't have enough time to do a reasonable job of ensuring the integrity of your journal, do you deserve to be in business as a journal publisher?" he asks. Oransky and Marcus have taken a similar stance. This summer, for example, Retraction Watch criticized the Journal of Neuroscience for a pair of identical retraction notices it published on 8 June: "At the request of the authors, the following manuscript has been retracted."

But the journal's editor-in-chief, neuroscientist John Maunsell of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, argues that such obscurity is often the most responsible course to take. "My feeling is that there are far fewer retractions than there should be," says Maunsell, who adds that he has conducted 79 ethics investigations in more than 3 years at the journal — 1 every 2–3 weeks. But "authors are reluctant to retract papers", he says, "and anything we put up in the way of a barrier or disincentive is a bad thing. If authors are happier posting retractions without extra information, I'd rather see that retraction go through than provide any discouragement."

At the heart of these arguments, says Steneck, lie shifting norms of how responsible journal editors should be for the integrity of the research process. In the past, he says, "they felt that institutions and scientists ought to do it". More and more journal editors today are starting to embrace the gatekeeper role. But even now, Shafer points out, they have only limited authority to challenge institutions that are refusing to cooperate. "I have had institutions, where I felt there was very clear misconduct, come back and tell me there was none," Shafer says. "And I have had a US institution tell me that they would look into allegations of misconduct only if I agreed to keep the results confidential."

The blame game

Discussions on Retraction Watch make it clear that many scientists would like to separate two aspects of retraction that seem to have become tangled together: cleaning up the literature, and signalling misconduct. After all, many retractions are straightforward and honourable. In July, for example, Derek Stein, a physicist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, retracted a paper in Physical Review Letters on DNA in nanofluidic channels when he found that a key part of the analysis had been performed incorrectly. His thoroughness and speed — the retraction came just four months after publication — were singled out for praise on Retraction Watch.

But because almost all of the retractions that hit the headlines are dramatic examples of misconduct, many researchers assume that any retraction indicates that something shady has occurred. And that stigma may dissuade honest scientists from doing the right thing. One American researcher who talked to Nature about his own early-career retraction said he hoped that his decision would be seen as a badge of honour. But, even years later and with his career established, he still did not want Nature to use his name or give any details of the case.

There is no general agreement about how to reduce this stigma. Rennie suggests reserving the retraction mechanism exclusively for misconduct, but that would require the creation of a new term for withdrawals owing to honest mistakes. At the other extreme, Thomas DeCoursey, a biologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, argues for retraction of any paper that publishes results that are not reproducible. "It does not matter whether the error was due to outright fraud, honest mistakes or reasons that simply cannot be determined," he says.

A better vocabulary for talking about retractions is needed, says Steneck — one acknowledging that retractions are just as often due to mistakes as to misconduct. Also useful would be a database for classifying retractions. "The risk for the research community is that if it doesn't take these problems more seriously, then the public — journalists, outsiders — will come in and start to poke at them," he points out.

The only near-term solution comes back to transparency. "If journals told readers why a paper was retracted, it wouldn't matter if one journal retracted papers for misconduct while another retracted for almost anything," says Zen Faulkes, a biologist at the University of Texas–Pan American in Edinburg, Texas.

Oransky agrees. "I think that what we're advocating is part of a much larger phenomenon in public life and on the Web right now," he says. "What scientists should be doing is saying, 'In the course of what we do are errors, and among us are also people that commit misconduct or fraud. Look how small that number is! And here's what we're doing to root that out.'"

Richard Van Noorden is an assistant news editor for Nature in London. For more analysis of retraction statistics, click here.

Medical journals retract "unethical" research

(Reuters) - The editors of 16 international medical journals have retracted "unethical" research carried out by a German doctor on drugs known as colloids, which boost blood volume in patients having surgery.>>>

Retraction Watch is watching you

Charles Day

Big, scandalous cases of scientific fraud are widely covered in the popular press. In the early 2000s Jan Hendrik Schön of Bell Labs published 21 papers about organic semiconductors: seven in Nature, six in Physical Review Letters, and eight in Science. All of them were withdrawn when it turned out that Schön had faked the results.
Schön's notoriety was so great that he became the subject not only of news reports, but also of books and even a BBC TV documentary, "The Dark Secret of Hendrik Schön."
Trends in scientific fraud also make the news, although not as often. Last September a report in Nature about a move to kill off China's weakest scientific journals began as follows:
Few Chinese scientists would be surprised to hear that many of the country's scientific journals are filled with incremental work, read by virtually no one and riddled with plagiarism. But the Chinese government's solution to this problem came as a surprise last week.
Low-key, "routine" cases of scientific fraud don't appear to be newsworthy. Like shoplifting, vandalism, disorderly conduct, and other misdemeanors, such cases are deemed of local, not national, interest. News of a plagiarized paragraph in a chemistry paper, say, might appear on a chemistry blog; less likely in the New York Times.
But a steady background of petty fraud harms the integrity of science more than sporadic spectacular outrages. A Schön or a Viktor Ninov, who faked evidence of a newly discovered superheavy element, can be excused as a pathological outlier. Widespread fraud suggests something intrinsically wrong with the science establishment.
So I was relieved to hear from Marty Hanna, a Physics Today copy editor, about Retraction Watch. Founded by Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, the blog strives to publicize every fraud-prompted retraction that occurs in the scientific literature.
Marcus and Oransky aren't the only watchdogs. Academic publishers, both nonprofit and for-profit, are collaborating to implement a software tool, CrossCheck, that screens for plagiarism when a paper is submitted.
Ideally, scientists shouldn't cheat. Realistically, some scientists, under pressure to succeed, will always succumb to temptation and commit fraud. When they do so, and when the watchdogs catch them, I hope they feel guilty and ashamed. That reaction would mean that efforts of the American Physical Society and others to instill ethical behavior are working.

U.S. Scientists Top Research-Fraud List -- How Concerned Should We Be?

A recent paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics showing that American scientists are responsible for most cases of scientific retractions and fraud is causing a stir.
The paper's author, Dr. R. Grant Steen, searched PubMed, a leading science research database, and identified 788 retracted papers from 2000 to 2010. Steen's research found that U.S. scientists were lead authors on 169 of the papers retracted for serious errors, as well as 84 retracted for outright fraud.
China followed the U.S. with 89 total retractions, including 20 due to fraud. Japan was next with 60 retractions (18 for fraud), then India and the U.K.
Steen's conclusion: "American scientists are significantly more prone to engage in data fabrication or falsification than scientists from other countries.">>>

Top retractions of 2010 - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

Jef Akst

Retractions are a scientist's worst nightmare. In the last 10 years, at least 788 scientific papers have been pulled from the literature, according to a study published this year in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Whether it is a result of research misconduct, duplicate publication, or simply sloppy data analysis, a retracted paper can devastate a scientist's research, or even impact a whole scientific field.

Here are 10 of the biggest retraction stories of the last year. >>>

Sultans of swap: Turkish researchers plagiarized electromagnetic fields-cancer paper, apparently others

The Bosnian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences has retracted a paper it published in August by Turkish researchers on the potential cancer risks associated with exposure to electromagnetic fields, or EMFs.

The reason: Other people wrote nearly all of it. >>>

Plagiarists plagiarized: A daisy chain of retractions at Anesthesia & Analgesia

Adam Marcus

If a plagiarist plagiarizes from an author who herself has plagiarized, do we call it a wash and go for a beer?
That scenario is precisely what Steven L. Shafer, MD, found himself facing recently. Dr. Shafer, editor-in-chief of Anesthesia & Analgesia (A&A), learned that authors of a 2008 case report in his publication had lifted two-and-a-half paragraphs of text from a 2004 paper published in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia.
A contrite retraction letter, which appears in the December issue of A&A, from the lead author, Sushma Bhatnagar, MD, of New Delhi, India, called the plagiarism “unintended” and apologized for the incident. Straightforward enough.
But then things get sticky. Amazingly, the December issue of A&A also retracts a 2010 manuscript by Turkish researchers who, according to Dr. Shafer, plagiarized from at least five other published papers—one of which happens to have been a 2008 article by Dr. Bhatnagar in the Journal of Palliative Medicine.
“Dr. Bhatnagar’s paper in Anesthesia & Analgesia was retracted because it contained text taken from a paper by Dr. Munir,” Dr. Shafer told Anesthesiology News. “However, Dr. Bhatnagar’s paper in the Journal of Palliative Medicine is one of the source journals for the plagiarism by Dr. Memiş. To give you an idea how widespread this is, we recently rejected a paper that copied large blocks for text from a paper by Dr. Memiş.”>>>