Japanese Plagiarism and Misrepresentation Case

Debora Weber-Wulff

A Japanese correspondent has alerted me to the strange case of Serkan Anilir. He is a German-born researcher of Turkish descent who was said to be an Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, Graduate School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo.

He has an impressive biography - but depending on which language you are reading (English, Japanese or Turkish) it is different. He claims to be a Turkish astronaut candidate for NASA, but closer inspection will show that this is his head photoshopped onto the body of Richard Hieb.

He has had "guest professorships" all over the world, according to the list is on the Turkish Wikipedia (translated here). It appears that he gave talks at these schools, but not that he had guest professorships. He is not listed in the official researchers lists for projects he supposedly worked on.

His publication list has a number of anomalies: wrong publisher; long article in a journal that only prints short ones; an examination of a given journal issue shows no article with that name; one publication can be found with the same name and co-author, but not with his name on it.

He also claims to be an Olympic gold medalist in skiing. However, there is no record of this.

Asahi Shinbum, a respected Japanese newspaper, picked this up and reported that they checked his reference that was supposed to be from the Turkish Air Force, but they denied that it was from them.

When things got hot in the Japanese press, an investigation into his dissertation was started. Since it turned out to be more than 40% plagiarized (later reports: 59%) the University of Tokyo revoked his doctorate in March of 2010 (press release in Japanese translated by Google) - the first time in the history of the university that they have done such a thing!

In the aftermath, his talk at TEDxTaipei in Taiwan and other places were mysteriously canceled. It is a shame that they were not open about this. He is no longer listed as a professor at the University of Tokyo. And the university has announced a crackdown on plagiarism.

Nice to hear of a success story, even if it did take 10 years!

Articles withdrawn from Open Access Database

Debora Weber-Wulff
I just ran across an article from 2007 about arXiv.org, one of the many Open Access databases, that withdrew 65 papers on General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology by 14 Turkish authors on the basis of the papers containing plagiarized material. One of the authors, a grad student at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, was listed on 40 (!) of the papers. >>>

Scientists informally intervene in cases of sloppy research - Ars Technica

John Timmer

Most people involved in scientific research are well aware of the big three ethical lapses: fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. These acts are considered to have such a large potential for distorting the scientific record that governments, research institutions, and funding bodies generally have formal procedures to investigate incidents, and formal sanctions for those found to have infringed. But the big three are hardly a complete list of all the problems that can produce misleading results; anything from poor record-keeping to sloppy techniques can cause errors to creep into the scientific literature, and there are rarely formal procedures to deal with them.

That doesn't mean they're not dealt with, however. A survey published by Nature has found that researchers regularly engage in informal interventions with colleagues if they suspect that there's any form of misconduct going on—even if they think the problems are inadvertent.

The survey asked about what its authors term "acts that could corrupt the scientific record," and defined them very broadly to include things like "poor supervision of assistants, carelessness, authorship disputes, failure to follow the rules of science, conflicts of interest, incompetence, and hostile work environments that impact on research quality." To get a sense for how these are dealt with, they looked up several thousand researchers who have received funding from the National Institutes of Health, and asked them to fill out an online survey.

The questions in the survey, as well as the responses of those queried, have been posted in a PDF at the authors' website.

Good news and bad news

The majority of the 2,600 researchers who responded had experienced a case where they suspected scientific errors were occurring—84 percent, in total. The authors ascribe this number, which is much higher than most other estimates, to the loose definition of misconduct that they provided. An alternate explanation might be that the self-selecting group that responded was more did so in part because they were aware of these issues. The authors omitted the 400 or so who had never noticed misconduct from most of their further analysis.

The good news for the scientific community is that, when researchers became aware of potential problems, they were fairly likely to do something about it. Almost two-thirds reported taking some type of action about the issues they noticed. Of the remainder, most felt that either action was already underway, or were too removed from the lab with issues to have a good sense of how to intervene.

Over 30 percent of those who acted went straight to the source, and had a discussion with the person they felt was having troubles. Another eight percent sent a message of concern to that individual (90 percent of these were signed), while 16 percent alerted someone in a position of authority about the trouble.

In about 21 percent of the cases where someone chose to intervene, the issue got bumped up to formal proceedings. Some of these may have been the result of denial on the part of the people involved (19 percent of the responses) or cases where the individuals failed to act at all (another 14 percent). Still, there were some good outcomes; in about 30 percent of the cases, the problem was either corrected or it was recognized that it was too late to do anything about it. One striking number here was that, out of all these instances, only a fraction of a percent turned out to be cases where the worries about problems were unwarranted.

About equal numbers of those polled expressed satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the results. Over half also felt that the incident had either had no effect on their career, or had even enhanced it. Still, that would seem to leave a lot of individuals who were dissatisfied and suffered some form of negative impact from the event.

There are a lot of interesting details in the numbers, as well. For example, many of those who chose to act did so in part because they considered their institutions unlikely to do anything. Those who were satisfied with the outcomes were also more likely to have been in a situation where the problems were inadvertent.

Overall, there are some promising aspects to these results. Scientists clearly feel that their ethics compel them to intervene in cases where the potential to distort the scientific record doesn't rise to the level of actual fraud. And many of these interventions appear to end in a satisfactory manner. But there are clearly still cases where institutions don't take the issues seriously, and the scientists who try to do the right thing feel that they suffer consequences as a result.

There's no obvious way to force institutions to take scientific errors and misconduct seriously. But the institutions that do so may want to consider the evidence that this informal policing of scientific ethics takes place. Providing support and advice on how to manage these situations, which can easily devolve into conflict, could significantly improve the scientific community's ability to police itself.

Nature, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/466438a (About DOIs).