Review 9Liana Mos et al – journal article copy/paste plagiarism


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Plagiarism of over 95% of the content.

Plagiarism of over 95% of the content.

Prof Liana Mos from the Faculty of Medicine Pharmacy and Dentistry from “Vasile Goldis” Western University, Arad, Romania, together with 6 other authors, were identified to have plagiarized extensively within their article entitled “Cytokine and atherogenesis“, published by the “Arad Medical Journal” in 2009, as confirmed by international experts below.

Among the 7 authors are:

The full list of authors is found in the Report section further below.

A call for restricting grant money

Among other sanctions to be applied to the journal and to the authors, the international experts below recommend that the authors should be cut off from funding sources and blocked from obtaining promotions. From the list above we can see that a Professor became Rector of the University the moment that this article was published. We can only speculate about the fate should this case had been surfaced earlier.

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What the experts so far are saying

The reviews below were sent by independent experts. They were invited by independent people like you (academics or general public) to answer the questions on Integru.org.

Dr Miguella Mark-Carew, USA
Dr Miguella Mark-Carew (web)
College of Veterinary Medicine
Cornell University, USA
 . . .  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  . . .

Q1. Conduct. To what extent does this material and conduct comply with ethical norms, as far as you are aware?

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.

Q2. Grey zone. Are there elements that are controversial but which cannot be clearly qualified as misconduct?

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.

Q3. Outcome. In your opinion, what should be the outcome in this situation? You may think of procedures, expectations in an international context, comparisons with similar instances, possible impact etc.

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.

Dr Ivan Liachko, USA
Dr Ivan Liachko (web)
Department of Genome Sciences, School of Medicine
University of Washington, USA
 . . .  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  . . .

Q1. Conduct. To what extent does this material and conduct comply with ethical norms, as far as you are aware?

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.

Q2. Grey zone. Are there elements that are controversial but which cannot be clearly qualified as misconduct?

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

Q3. Outcome. In your opinion, what should be the outcome in this situation? You may think of procedures, expectations in an international context, comparisons with similar instances, possible impact etc.

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.

Dr Michael Autieri, USA
Dr Michael Autieri (web)
Department of Physiology
Temple University School of Medicine, USA
 . . .  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,  . . .

Q1. Conduct. To what extent does this material and conduct comply with ethical norms, as far as you are aware?

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.

Q2. Grey zone. Are there elements that are controversial but which cannot be clearly qualified as misconduct?

No. They plagiarised two published articles.

Q3. Outcome. In your opinion, what should be the outcome in this situation? You may think of procedures, expectations in an international context, comparisons with similar instances, possible impact etc.

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.

Report

Misconduct Copy/paste Plagiarism in Scientific Journal Article
Severity Over 95% of effective content
Document "Cytokine and atherogenesis", Arad Medical Journal, 2009
Institutions "Vasile Goldis" University, Arad, Romania University of Medicine and Pharmacy "Gr. T. Popa", Iasi, Romania
Date 2009
Authors (time of writing)
  • Prof Liana Mos - Dean - Faculty of Medicine, Pharmacy and Dentistry, "Vasile Goldis" University
  • Prof Corina Zorila - Vice-Dean - same Faculty and University
  • Prof Coralia Cotoraci - Professor - same Faculty and University
  • Dr Ioana Dana Alexa - Associate Professor and Vice-Dean - Faculty of Medicine, "Gr. T Popa" University.
  • Wiener Adrian, Grec Veronica, and Alina Marian - ? - Faculty of Medicine, Pharmacy and Dentistry, "Vasile Goldis" University
Authors (now)

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2 comments

  1. Corrected position of Dr Ioana Dana Alexa from Professor to Associate Professor (Dec 2012). If you have more recent information about the position of any of the authors then please let us know.

  2. liana mos and cotoraci are daughter in law and daughter of ardelean copy/paste atlas flora romaniei

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