Misconduct, Not Error, Found Behind Most Journal Retractions - THE CHRONICLE

Paul Basken
Research misconduct, rather than error, is the leading cause of retractions in scientific journals, with the problem especially pronounced in more prestigious publications, a comprehensive analysis has concluded.

The analysis, described on Monday in PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges previous findings that attributed most retractions to mistakes or inadvertent failures in equipment or supplies.
The PNAS finding came from a comprehensive review of more than 2,000 published retractions, including detailed investigations into the public explanations given by the retracting authors and their journals.>>>

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.

Band of Academic-Plagiarism Sleuths Undoes German Politicians - THE CHRONICLE of HIGHER EDUCATION

By Aisha Labi

The bad news keeps coming for the disgraced former German defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, a once-rising star in his country's conservative party. On Wednesday the University of Bayreuth published the full report of its investigation into plagiarism in his 2006 doctoral dissertation in law.

The university's assessment, which Mr. Guttenberg had initially sought to prevent from being made public, was unsparing: Not only was most of his dissertation plagiarized from a range of sources, including newspapers, journals, and the official research service for German parliamentarians, which lawmakers are forbidden to use for personal purposes, but even if the work had been Mr. Guttenberg's, it would not have merited the summa cum laude it was originally awarded.

The revelations of how extensively Mr. Guttenberg had plagiarized came as no surprise to one group of people: an online community of plagiarism detectors that formed since the allegations against him came to light. That loose band of academic vigilantes helped to compile and disseminate the information that eventually brought about Mr. Guttenberg's downfall. Its members have since set their sights on other high-profile figures, and, although they do not work directly with universities, their online sleuthing is having an impact.

Also on Wednesday, the University of Konstanz announced that it had stripped Veronica Sass, the daughter of another leading conservative politician, of her law doctorate. Another politician, Silvana Koch-Mehrin, whose doctoral dissertation is under investigation by the University of Heidelberg, stepped down on Wednesday from her posts as a vice president of the European Parliament and the board of her political party.

Part of the explanation for the apparent proliferation of plagiarism among politicians is the prevalence of doctoral degrees among figures outside of academe. Many German politicians and business leaders have doctoral titles and have few qualms about using them, even if they never set foot on a university campus after they earn their degrees.

"Everybody has their name on their door in bronze and wants to have their doctoral title there, too; that's really important," said Debora Weber-Wulff, a professor of media and computing at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin who has been active in the recent online plagiarism-detecting movement. The attitude toward academic titles, she said, has much to do with the traditional German reverence of learning. "Someone who has a doctorate is highly respected," she said.

Online Teamwork

Mr. Guttenberg was hardly the only German politician to proudly affix "Dr." to his name, but he was the first to be subjected to the forensic scrutiny of an online examination of his academic bona fides. The allegations against him first came to light in February, when a law professor at the University of Bremen raised questions about the minister's dissertation in a newspaper article. Events snowballed from there, said Tim Bartel, who works as country manager in Germany for Wikia, a for-profit sister company of the Wikimedia Foundation, and an online community dedicated to examining Mr. Guttenberg's thesis soon took shape.

A handful of bloggers began looking into Mr. Guttenberg's dissertation and posting their findings in a variety of online forums. As their output grew, it became clear that they would need a more hospitable venue than so many disparate sites or even the Google document that had been created, which allowed access to only about 100 people. The original creator of the site where they ended up collaborating, GuttenPlag Wiki, was a doctoral candidate with a background in online gaming, through which he was familiar with the collaborative wikia format, said Mr. Bartel. Like many who have been active in the online plagiarism-hunting effort, that person, who goes by the handle PlagDoc, prefers to remain pseudonymous.

At the start, said Mr. Bartel, he and PlagDoc were the only two GuttenPlag participants. By the end of the site's first day in operation, about 20 people were active online. "It's pretty hard to say the exact number of people that are involved," said Mr. Bartel. Because there is no requirement for participants to sign up, some flit in and out of the forum while others are active on a regular basis. "Some people don't come back, some people just sign in to fix a typo, some people join every day and work for several hours."

Max Ruppert, a doctoral candidate in journalism studies at the Technical University of Dortmund, and another doctoral candidate conducted an online survey of GuttenPlag participants during what Mr. Ruppert describes as its "hot phase," when thousands were logging in each day. The results allowed them to form a profile of who was active on the site.

They identified a "hard core" of 140 participants who were coming regularly to the site and taking the initiative in leading and managing online tasks. The successor site that has continued to investigate other allegations of plagiarism, VroniPlag Wiki, has many of the same active users, said Mr. Bartel.

Color-Coding Copying

Organizing online work was a challenge, especially since at the outset there was no real-time communication. Soon after an online chat forum was set up, it was drawing around 100 active users at a time, and participants were then able to make sure there was little overlap as they dissected Mr. Guttenberg's dissertation page by page. Site members created a means of identifying which pages contained plagiarized material, assigning a bar-code pattern to indicate plagiarism.

The more bars in the pattern, the more plagiarism a page contained. "White means it was checked and there was no plagiarism, black means plagiarism, and red means plagiarism on this page from more than one source," said Mr. Bartel. By the end, he said, "I think there are only about 5 percent of the pages on his thesis where there was no plagiarism, which was the opposite of what we had expected."

Although Mr. Guttenberg resigned in early March, the university also began looking into his thesis, spurred in part by the avalanche of coverage in the mainstream news media, much of which relied on GuttenPlag's digging. In its full findings announced on Wednesday, it placed the blame squarely on Mr. Guttenberg and cleared itself and Mr. Guttenberg's supervising professor of wrongdoing.

Ms. Weber-Wulff says she believes, however, that at least part of the responsibility for the culture that enabled Mr. Guttenberg to get away with such an egregious violation lies with Germany's higher-education system. There is a longstanding notion that professors own all the work done under their supervision, and many are guilty of plagiarism, she said. "In Germany the professors let their doctoral students write for them and then publish under their own name. Doctoral students then steal from the bachelor's and master's students under them. We end up having plagiarism all the way down," she said.

One way of eliminating at least part of the problem would be to cut down on the proliferation of doctoral degrees. "We need to leave the doctoral titles in academia where they belong," she said.

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.”.>>>