Short links

Thanks to a correspondent for combing Google News for these links:

• The International News (30 March 2014) reports that a professor in India Pakistan is being forced to retire on account of plagiarism in research articles he published:
  

  The Punjab University (PU) syndicate on Saturday, confirming plagiarism charges against the varsity’s Institute of Chemistry Prof Dr Zaid Mahmood, penalised him with forced retirement under the PEEDA Act. [...] Dr Zaid had been claiming that his research papers were published before 2007 and therefore they could not be made a subject of the inquiry as per the HEC’s plagiarism policy.

  As if just waiting a number of years somehow changes a plagiarism into a non-plagiarism. The article does not state if the papers are being retracted.
  
  
• The Guardian has a piece (21 March 2014) on how easy it is to plagiarize using the Internet, but also how easy it is to find people out:
  

  The act of uncovering and investigating acts of plagiarism is becoming easier by the day. Search engines, online plagiarism checkers (of varying quality) and the viral publicity opportunities afforded by social media all play their part. Plagiarism searches can be compelling, like addictive puzzles where positive results elicit mental fist-pumps of delight.

• The Times Higher Education notes (3 April 2014) that a senior sociologist, caught by a young PhD in plagiarizing from the Wikipedia, of all places, finds that rules about referencing don't apply to his scholarship:
  

  An eminent sociologist has claimed that high-quality scholarship does not depend on “obedience” to “technical” rules on referencing after a PhD student accused him of plagiarising from websites, including Wikipedia, in his latest book.
  
  Zygmunt Bauman, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Leeds, was responding to claims that he fails to clearly indicate that several passages in his 2013 book Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? are exact or near-exact quotations from the online encyclopedia and other web sources.

  Bauman tries to put the PhD student down by snorting that ideas aren't owned by anyone. But really, shouldn't every academic be able to clearly state what is from others? It does then rather save face when it turns out that something one is using from other people without attribution is just plain wrong...

Doctoral Plagiarism Elsewhere

Plagiarized doctoral theses are not only to be found in Germany. Janet Stemwedel reports on Adventures in Ethics and Science on the case of chemist Bengü Sezen. She links to Chemical & Engineering News with a report on the dissertation and three other papers. She quotes:

The documents—an investigative report from Columbia and HHS’s subsequent oversight findings—show a massive and sustained effort by Sezen over the course of more than a decade to dope experiments, manipulate and falsify NMR and elemental analysis research data, and create fictitious people and organizations to vouch for the reproducibility of her results. ...
A notice in the Nov. 29, 2010, Federal Register states that Sezen falsified, fabricated, and plagiarized research data in three papers and in her doctoral thesis. Some six papers that Sezen had coauthored with Columbia chemistry professor Dalibor Sames have been withdrawn by Sames because Sezen’s results could not be replicated. ...
By the time Sezen received a Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 2005, under the supervision of Sames, her fraudulent activity had reached a crescendo, according to the reports. Specifically, the reports detail how Sezen logged into NMR spectrometry equipment under the name of at least one former Sames group member, then merged NMR data and used correction fluid to create fake spectra showing her desired reaction products.

Correction fluid? I thought that state-of-the-art fakes used Photoshop these days.