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The journal "Engineering with Computers" publishes plagiarized article, retracts

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

IPBiz has covered plagiarized texts which have appeared in science journals (eg,
British science paper on "sperm from stem cells" retracted! ). There's another one out, this time
involving plagiarism by Kamran Daneshjou, Iran's science minister, wherein the journal "Engineering with
Computers" published in 2009 a paper copied from a 2002 published article.

The journal Nature wrote: Anthony Doyle, publishing editor for the Springer journal Engineering with Computers, in which the paper was published, also told Nature that the journal will label it as "retracted" online, and include an erratum in the next issue drawing attention to the matter. "Springer takes plagiarism very seriously."

What one will not find in the Nature article is any discussion of "how" the plagiarized article came to
be published in the first place.

Facts presented in the Nature article suggest the copying is egregious:

"The introduction is copied practically word-for-word," comments Muhammad Sahimi, an Iranian materials scientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, adding that so too are large parts of the methods, results and discussion section. "The English of the paper is not uniform," he notes, "Where they have copied from other papers, it reads smoothly. Where they have tried to add things themselves, it does not read as smoothly."

Similarly, almost all the figures, and their captions, are copied from the South Korean paper, although their order is sometimes different, he notes, adding that some are mirror images of those in the earlier paper.

How come nobody at the journal noticed this stuff BEFORE publishing?

The plagiarized article is Daneshjou, K. & Shahravi, M. Eng. Comput. 25, 191-206 (2009).

The copied, source article is Lee, W., Lee, H-J. & Shin, H. J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 35, 2676?2686 (2002)..

Full post as published by IPBiz on September 30, 2009 (boomark / email).