A Abramowicz

J B Pełka

J Krupka

W Paszkowicz

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Vol. 119 (2011) ACTA PHYSICA POLONICA A No. 6
Letter to the Editor
Old Studies with New Authors:
A Discovery Ending with Retraction
W. Paszkowicza, J.B. Pełkaa, J. Krupkab and A. Abramowiczb
aInstitute of Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, al. Lotników 32/46, PL-02-668 Warsaw, Poland
bDept. of Electronics, Faculty of Electronics and Information Technology, Warsaw University of Technology
pl. Politechniki 1, PL-00-661 Warsaw, Poland
It is not pleasant to discover and announce a case of
mass-scale plagiarism. Quite recently, one of us (A.A.)
discovered that three papers of Polish authors [1–3] have
been copied and re-published under a different author’s
name — I. Stanca, affiliated with the Oradea University
(Romania) and, in one case, also with the Trinity Col-
lege (Dublin, Ireland). Short search led to the discovery
of as many as 12 fraudulent texts re-published in the form
of 16 independent papers (four among twelve have been
published twice). One among sixteen was identified only
provisionally, because of difficulties in accessing a local
journal, the identification being thus based on its unam-
biguous title. Essentially, the papers were copied entirely
or copied with some specific (minor) changes, but in some
cases, parts of other papers were inserted. According to
our search, there exist also several multi-authored pa-
pers where the above-mentioned person is on the second
or further place on the authors’ list: our search does not
give any indication that these multiauthored papers are
plagiarized. In this Letter, we briefly present the results
of our search. Moreover, we mention the possible preven-
tive measures that can be taken against plagiarism.
The method applied here was very simple. Appar-
ently, it is quite easy to produce “the new” from “the
old” and this task can be performed in a short time. Let
us take an old “forgotten” paper, copy it and replace the
author’s name with our own. Acknowledgments have to
be changed or removed. We may modify the title, but it
is not necessary. Within the text, we change the expres-
sion “our work” to “someone’s work” when referring to
earlier papers of original authors. There is a big chance
that the product will be accepted for publication, pro-
vided that the referees are neither very demanding nor
inquiring. This recipe does not guarantee smooth sailing.
If the paper is experimental, then it probably has many
authors, and frequently multiple experimental techniques
are combined to achieve the goal of the original paper.
We prefer to be the sole author. However, a reader can
easily notice that one author uses multiple experimen-
tal techniques, which is not that probable. The second
problem we may encounter is the laboratory equipment:
if the equipment applied is commercial and available at
any institution, then there is no problem. Otherwise,
this obstacle is difficult to surmount — how to explain
the access to rare equipment? The next issue is refer-
ences. The paper is old, so the readers can easily see
that the references are obsolete. The last step is to send
the as-prepared successive paper to a journal. The pro-
duced papers seemed to be good, but after some time
we notice that they are so little cited. It is natural for
obsolete scientific articles, but we can overcome this by
adding self citations. As a result, we have a collection of
cited scientific papers.
Producing scientific papers using this method by the
above-mentioned person has gone undetected for seven
years. We have identified 16 papers produced from 15
sources (14 papers and one webpage). The following jour-
nals have published the plagiarized papers: 1. Modern
Physics Letters B, 2. Revista de Tehnologii Neconven-
tionale (Nonconventional Technologies Review), 2. Ro-
manian Journal of Physics, 3. Journal of Optoelectronics
and Electronic Materials, 4. Proceedings of the Romanian
Academy, Series A, 5. Romanian Reports in Physics, 6.
Analele Universitatii din Oradea, Fascicula Fizica, 7. An-
nals of West University of Timisoara.
The 16 plagiarized papers have been written according
to the above recipe. For all but one the time distance to
the original was quite large, 5 to 15 years, which, together
with the rather local character of the journals suggests
that this activity served the purpose of fulfilling bureau-
cratic requirements rather than presenting “new” discov-
eries. Some original papers have been copied without
great care and without having been read as indicated
by errors immediately exposing the fraud, and show-
ing that the referees (if any) did not go through them
carefully. For example, one of copied papers describes
a synchrotron in Dublin: such facilities exist in several
countries, only-this particular one has been “moved” from
Hamburg.
The fact that two almost identical plagiaries were pub-
(901)
902 W. Paszkowicz et al.
lished in the same journal (within a time difference of
several years) suggests that the acceptance procedures
were not very rigorous. The obvious observation that
the acknowledgments found in the fraudulent papers are
meaningless is also worth noting.
The harmed journals list includes: Superconductor Sci-
ence and Technology, Surface and Coatings Technology,
Thin Solid films, Physica C, Technical Physics, Review of
Scientific Instruments, Superconductivity, Acta Physica
Polonica A; some original papers come from conference
proceedings which are not listed here. All considered
plagiarisms have many “previous” authors (in total, 50
people have been harmed by this activity). They come
from ten countries. There are (only) several co-authors
at the headings of the plagiarisms, We have grounds to
believe that the co-authors have not been informed about
the way the papers were prepared.
The number of harmed universities and institutes
is eighteen: three institutions from USA (Ohio Univ.
Athens; Univ. South Alabama, Mobile; University of Al-
abama in Huntsville), three from the Russian Federation
(Russian Academy of Sciences and Russian Electrotech-
nical University, both from St. Petersburg; Institute of
Microstructure Physics of RAS, Nizhni Novgorod), three
from France (Université d’Orleans; Université Paris VI,
and Université Paris VII), two from Poland (Institute
of Physics PAS; Warsaw University of Technology), two
from Japan (Nanoelectronics Institute, Tsukuba; Yama-
gata University), two from Ukraine (Institute of Surface
Chemistry; NPO “Saturn”, both from Kiev), one from
Italy (ITC, Povo, Trento), one from South Korea (Yon-
sei University, Seoul) and one from Germany (Darmstadt
University of Technology, Darmstadt).
Short time after the discovery, we were informed by
the authorities of the Oradea University about an inves-
tigation of the incident and their decision to retract all
fraudulent papers, so there is no need to focus on the
details of the case. It seems more interesting to learn
what can be done to discourage potential plagiarists from
their copying and to help journals detect plagiarized sci-
entific work before publishing. Plagiarism is an old phe-
nomenon: certainly, it is (technically) easier to rewrite
someone’s work or to present someone’s results as one’s
own than to write one’s own paper. As an example, in
the domain of biomedical papers the level of plagiarism
has been reported to reach 1.4% of all publications (see
Ref. [4], for some other evaluation see Ref. [5]). Exam-
ples of plagiarism and of retractions in eminent journals
can be found in Refs. [6, 7], the well known recent ones
being those discovered in East Asia [8, 9]. The copy/
paste method used at a small or moderate scale is not a
good practice either (even if accompanied with citation).
Let us give two examples found: (i) a single abstract has
served, with small amendments, for four papers (or rather
two pairs of papers) published by two different groups
from the same university [10–13]; (ii) two characteristic
printing errors (“Kronecher delta” instead of “Kronecker
delta” and “stain” instead of “strain”) have been commit-
ted in Ref. [10] when presenting a theory described by
someone else [14], then these errors propagated to other
articles [15, 16, 12, 13, 17], mostly due to the copy/paste
method used by the same person and by another group
for description of theoretical background of Ref. [10].
The phenomenon of plagiarism has some interesting
features. For example, it has been observed that re-
spected scientists continue their plagiarism after its dis-
covery [18]. A research by Budd et al. [19] has demon-
strated that even after their retraction, the fraudulent
papers are cited. Undoubtedly, in eliminating plagia-
rism the role of editors and referees is of key importance
(for a more profound discussion see Refs. [20–22]). As-
tonishingly, a study of Wager et al. [23] shows that edi-
tors do not consider plagiarism as a serious phenomenon.
There exist a lot of anti-spam and anti-virus software.
Should not the journal editors treat the anti-plagiarism
software as others do with anti-virus and anti-spam pro-
grams? Moreover, some simple features of plagiarism can
be identified early on during reading-they may sound off
the alarm at the level of refereeing.
Internet access to abstracts and full texts of scientific
publications provides a strong weapon against plagia-
rism, because of the opportunities for text search and
analysis (examples of suitable programs are mentioned
in literature [24–26] and available on the market (such as
CrossCheck or Viper). Crystallographic journals openly
inform the potential authors about anti-plagiarism means
applied [27, 28]. It is worth noting that international
competitions in writing anti-plagiarism software are or-
ganized (in 2010 it was won by a Romanian scientist [29]).
If the very recent postulate that experimental data be-
come an integral part of the publication [30] is real-
ized, additional possibilities of verification will arise for
a meaningful part of publications, leading to increasing
opportunities of eliminating plagiarism at early stages of
manuscript analysis.
The present findings provide one more argument
against the evaluation of scientists’ work on the basis
of the quantity of their publications or, as argued by
Kotov [31], on the basis of any other simple number. In-
stead, the evaluation should be based on the quality of
the publication: evaluations involving the journal impact
factor and/or citation number are certainly better. How-
ever, some weak points remain. How to include books/
textbooks which do not have any impact factor ascribed?
How to filter negative citations? A step towards these so-
lutions has been postulated [8] and, as far as we know,
at least partly realized, for example, in the Peoples’ Re-
public of China [32].
In summary, in this Letter we describe, a serious
academic fraud, and, on these grounds, briefly discuss
some possible ways of improving the evaluation proce-
dures that could lead to better filtering of submitted
manuscripts against plagiarism. We argue that jour-
nal and book editors should consider using the available
means in order to eliminate plagiarism at the stage of
submission of manuscripts. The observation that con-
Old Studies with New Authors: A Discovery Ending with Retraction . . . 903
ditions are less favorable for plagiarism, when the sci-
entist’s career depends on the quality rather than the
quantity of his scientific output, may indicate how best
to fight against the phenomenon of plagiarism by admin-
istrative means in future. Less instances of plagiarism
should hopefully instill more confidence in science at a
time when the media pay much more attention to a single
case of plagiarism than to a valuable scientific discovery.
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Old Studies with New Authors: A Discovery Ending with Retraction

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Old Studies with New Authors: A Discovery Ending with Retraction

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