iThenticate Blog

On the surface, the story of Yvonne Hew seems to be a fairly standard story about plagiarism in the age of digital journalism.

Hew, up until recently, wrote a weekly column for the Denver Bronco’s site Mile High Report, which is part of the SB Nation stable of websites. However, a recent column she posted entitled “Horse Tracks: Which Draft prospects should the Denver Broncos avoid?” was recognized as having strong similarities to an article on Scout.com by Erick Trickel entitled “Finding Broncos: 5 NFL Draft Prospects Denver Must Avoid In The First Round”.

The standards of attribution are not universal. How, when and what we cite varies wildly depending upon the type of work, the profession and the expectations of the audience in general.

Plagiarism has been a hot topic in Croatia over the past few months.

In October 2016, local media began to report that newly appointed science minister, Pavo Barišić, had plagiarized in a 2008 paper published in a local journal. He was accused of having plagiarized content from various English authors including Samuel Huntington, Carl Boggs and Stephen Schlesinger as well as pulling from Wikipedia.

However, the allegations were old, having been originally raised in 2011 by four of his colleagues. At the time, two separate ethics boards reviewed the case and cleared Barišić’s name.

Back in December, Retraction Watch told the story of Michael Dansiger, a researcher at the Tufts Medical Center in Boston.

Dansiger submitted a paper to the Annals of Internal Medicine, which rejected it for publication. While even good research can be rejected, the story took an unexpected twist when the paper was republished in EXCLI Journal with different authors, and one of the peer reviewers who originally rejected was listed as an author.

2016 will undoubtedly be one of the most remembered and talked-about years for a long, long time.

While that’s certainly true for world events, it’s also very true for plagiarism. When it comes to academic and publishing dishonesty, 2016 was a banner year.

With that in mind, we wanted to take a look back at the year that was and, as we welcome 2017, get a preview of what is likely ahead.

Pavo Barišić is Croatia’s new Science Minister. Appointed by the right-wing government coalition following the second election this year, Barišić is already proving to be a very controversial choice.

This is especially true among the local academic community, which has taken issue with scandals from his past. Those scandals include everything from prior praise for Nazi sympathizers to misuse of public funds.

One of those scandals is a plagiarism scandal that has only recently come to light despite the allegations originally being filed in 2011.

 The story was first reported in the newspaper Novosti in October. However, the allegations were actually filed in 2011 with a higher education ethics committee. According to the allegations, a 2008 paper published by Barišić in Synthesis Philosophica contained plagiarized text from U.S. political commentator Stephen Schlesinger.

Christopher S. Collins from Azusa Pacific University is an interesting case study when it comes to accidental plagiarism.

In April 2014, he published an article entitled “Can funding for university partnerships between Africa and the US contribute to social development and poverty reduction?” in the journal Higher Education. In May 2015, the article was retracted after editors discovered that it contained plagiarized sentences from work presented at a 2012 conference.

When Retraction Watch reached out to Collins about the incident Collins wrote back a lengthy and contrite apology for the incident. Taking full responsibility for the plagiarism, Collins explained that it was a simple error, a matter of him writing verbatim notes from the conference and then pasting them months later, forgetting they were copied.

On September 8th, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari addressed his nation with a speech announcing a new
campaign entitled “Change Begins with Me”. The aim of the campaign is to attack “dishonesty, indolence, unbridled corruption and widespread impunity” in the country.

According to a recent post on Retraction Watch, Hossein Jafarzadeh, a PhD candidate at the University of Tehran, has found himself in a unique position: Having had a paper retracted for being a duplicate publication of two papers he co-authored that were, themselves, retracted for plagiarism.

Jafarzadeh, in 2014, published a pair of papers, one in February and one in July, in the journal Materials Science and Engineering. Those papers were largely identical, so much so that they were both pulled for plagiarism, albeit they were accused of plagiarizing from different sources.

Karen Abrinia, Jafarzadeh’s co-author on the papers, explained the original plagiarism by saying that they were the result of images that were taken from other papers, She claimed the researchers sent out samples from the research to a 3rd party for microscopic photography but received back images from other papers.

In late August, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a complaint against OMICS, an open access academic journal publisher that has long been at the center of the debate over “predatory” publishers.