Patent Law

Plagiarism in the journal Proteomics

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

John H. McDonald, biological sciences professor at University of Delaware in the U.S., is claiming via his blog that Han Jin, medical professor of Inje University has "stolen" some paragraphs from at least six recent biology papers.

Prof. Han of the university, located in South Gyeongsang Province, and Mohamad Warda of Cairo University in Egypt co-published a paper entitled ``Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul?? in Proteomics, an international journal on Jan 23.

The case is the latest in a series of plagiarisms by Korean medical professors. Last year, one Seoul National University professor and another at University of Seoul were implicated in such cases.

The Harvard Crimson discussed the matter in the following way:

In addition to supporting the idea of creationism with little evidence, the authors are under fire for plagiarizing.

According to John H. McDonald, a biological sciences professor at the University of Delaware, they may have stolen sentences from at least six recent biology papers.

These were originally identified online in the science blog Pharyngula and further instances were found using Turnitin.com, a Web site devoted to plagiarism prevention.

He expressed disbelief as to how the article could have been published into a respected, peer-reviewed journal.

?Proteomics is a decent, mid-level journal; not the place you would send your very best work, but not someplace you would be embarrassed to publish in, either,? McDonald said.

LaBaer said that it was surprising that the journal did not discover the plagiarism.

?Usually you would think with peer reviews the people who reviewed would have picked up on this,? LaBaer said. ?Plagiarism can be very subtle.?

When asked whether the paper would be retracted, Michael J. Dunn, the editor of Proteomics and a professor at the University College Dublin Conway Institute of Biomolecular & Biomedical Research, wrote in an e-mail that he is looking into the matter with the publishing house, but refused to make any further comments.

***
Of cite checkers for journals, recall text from a post on IPFrontline -->

First, Jaffe and Lerner did not talk about U.S. 6,574,645 on page 144 of Innovation and Its Discontents. That illustrates that neither the authors of "Peer to Peer Meets the World of Legal Information: Encountering a New Paradigm" nor the editors/cite checkers at the Law Library Journal were checking the citation.

***
Then, of course, recall that the folks at the Stanford Law Review let slip by an assertion that Gary Boone invented the
integrated circuit. See for example

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/08/did-mark-lemley-name-gary-boone-as.html

***
The people who "reviewed" journals don't pick up on a lot. As IPBiz has noted, publishing WRONG things is far worse for the
public than not properly crediting the source of right things (tho both are bad).

Full post as published by IPBiz on February 12, 2008 (boomark / email).