http://chronicle.com/news/article/2981/turkish-professors-uncover-plagiarism-in-papers-posted-on-physics-server
Turkish Professors Uncover Plagiarism in Papers Posted on Physics Server
The Chronicle of Higher Education
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September 6, 2007
Turkish Professors Uncover Plagiarism in Papers Posted on Physics Server
Dozens of academic papers containing apparently plagiarized work have been removed by moderators from arXiv, the popular preprint server where many physicists post their work before publication, Nature (subscription required) is reporting. According to the article, 67 papers by 15 physicists at four Turkish universities were pulled after an examination of their content revealed that they “plagiarize the works of others or contain inappropriate levels of overlap with earlier articles.”
Nature quotes Mustafa Salti, a graduate student at the Middle East Technical University whose name was on 40 of the problematic papers, defending his work: “Most of our papers have been published in the science citation index journals. Until now no one has claimed that we plagiarize.”
Suspicions were apparently stoked when, during oral defenses of their dissertations last fall, Mr. Salti and another student demonstrated a poor grasp of even the most basic of physics concepts. Professors at the university began to investigate the students’ work and turned up several examples of plagiarized work by them, as well as by students and professors at three other Turkish universities — Dicle University, the University of Mersin, and Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University.
The investigating professors notified the moderators of the arXiv site, which is based at Cornell University. The service’s founder, Paul Ginsparg, told Nature that the incident was the worst case of plagiarism the site had ever experienced. —Aisha Labi
Posted on Thursday September 6, 2007 | Permalink |
Comments
1.
Let’s hope the Iranian physicists are just as inept!
— marci Sep 6, 01:33 PM #
2.
According to the Nature article, over half these papers were published in peer-reviewed journals. It’s rather worrying that they all got through the peer-review process.
— David Sep 7, 05:45 AM #
3.
Let’s hope the American and other western physicists are just as inept!
— Gerrard Sep 7, 12:29 PM #
4.
Hmm, it’s taken long enough for people to notice — a few of us physics types have been following this story for weeks!
http://www.eurekajournalwatch.org/index.php/2007_Plagiarism_Ring_Affair
— Blake Stacey Sep 7, 01:26 PM
