The purpose of a review article is to amass information from several different sources into one document that harmoniously ties the information together. When properly done, a review article is particularly useful in that it aggregates literature on a particular research topic or field, providing readers with easier access to relevant areas of interests and potential collaborations with researchers with similar academic interests, supplementing the need to conduct a literature search. The article in question does amass information from several sources, but in a manner that is inaccurate, misleading, blatantly plagiarized, and taken from several sources there were not referenced. The authors did not comply with ethical norms prior to submitting this manuscript for publication.

The only grey area I foresee in this situation is the use of uncopyrighted PowerPoint presentations; though, there the author of the PowerPoint presentation could have been acknowledged.

The article should be retracted from the journal. Past research material from these authors should be highly scrutinized for accuracy and possible plagiarism. The reviewers of the article should be questioned to determine if they were aware of the misuse of references and/or for blatant plagiarism. The disregard and lack of respect of the work of others within the scientific community is disappointing. It is my hope that the University’s ethical board understands the weight of this issue and acts appropriately.

The authors directly copied large segments of content from two published papers (Calabrese et al and Daugherty et al) as well as two presentations and one course lecture summary document. The authors have a bibliography, but do not reference the papers that were the sources of copied information, indicating an intent to conceal the plagiarism. Sections of text lifted from published source materials were edited in a way that makes them inconsistent with the tables of data and internally inconsistent with the text of the paper, also indicating an intent to deceive the reader. The data tables were clearly copied and pasted as images directly from the source material, indicating laziness.

This is a clear case of intentional plagiarism as all the text within the paper can be directly traced to another work. This material does not meet even basic ethical standards of scientific publishing.

Direct plagiarism is never acceptable, the only grey area I can think of is the copying from unpublished lecture slides.

I believe the scientific community should be made aware of this instance of plagiarism. The material should be publicly retracted from the journal and the retraction should be visible anytime the article is accessed. This would prevent the authors from benefiting from the ignorance of others of this act of misconduct. The authors should be reprimanded with being blocked from funding sources and other professional promotions.

Ethics enforcement is especially important for less prominent institutions as they must work harder for legitimacy than more established universities.

Using exact text from published articles, Daugherty and Calabrese are blatantly plagiarised and the fact that they are not referenced is unforgivable. Lifting exact text from the lectures posted on-line, although lazy and poor scholarship, may not be plagiarism from those authors as we do not know the source where they came from. Further, they are not copyrighted.

In all, a poor article that should be retracted just for the innaccuracies, typographical errors, and misspellings. The journal should be sanctioned as well for obviously no due diligence on peer review.

No. They plagiarised two published articles.

The author and the publisher should be sanctioned. The author should not be eligible to receive grant money or publish in international peer-reviewed journals.