Posts Tagged ‘Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur’

Academic Cheating: China and India need to clean up their acts

October 9, 2010

The number of scientific research papers published in India stood at 22,215 in 2007, up from 11,067 a decade earlier.  Chinese academies published a similar number of papers in 1997 — 12,632 but that figure had leapt to 67,433 by 2007.  China in 2007 contributed8.6 percent of the world’s scientific papers while India produced 2.4 percent.

 

Plagiarism

 

Publish or perish is the prevailing paradigm in both countries and plagiarism, data manufacture and manipulation and just downright cheating are endemic to academia. (Plagiarism is rampant in the Indian movie industry and in book publishing as well so academia merely reflects the society at large).

Where cases of plagiarism come to light as with the recent high profile case of plagiarism in reports on GM crops or the cases of plagiarism at IIT-Kanpur, the whitewash committees soon swing into action. Even if sometimes suspended, it does not take long for the parties involved to regain their former positions. CYA prevails.

But the solution does not lie just with correcting institutional processes and better monitoring. A fundamental change in institutional and personal standards of ethics  is required. Academia will need to lead society and not just be sheep.

Just some of the recent cases of academic plagiarism in India and China are given below:

India

  1. Plagiarism: a scourge afflicting the Indian science
  2. Plagiarism plagues India’s genetically modified crops
  3. Biotechnology Advances retracts 3 papers from India for plagiarism
  4. Scientific plagiarism in India
  5. We must restore scientific integrity in Indian research
  6. In India, plagiarism is on the rise
  7. Call for Indian plagiarism watchdog
  8. Copycats from IIT-Kanpur?

China

  1. Do plagiarism, fraud, and retractions make it more difficult trust research from China?
  2. Rampant Fraud Threat to China’s Brisk Ascent.
  3. Scientists behaving badly; Recent events show China needs to clean up its scientific act.
  4. Academic corruption undermining higher education: Yau Shing-tung.
  5. CHINA: Universities fail to tackle plagiarism.
  6. In China, academic cheating is rampant; Some say practice harmful to nation.
  7. CHINA: Professor sacked for academic plagiarism
  8. Nearly half of China’s science workers think academic cheating is “common”.

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Biotechnology Advances retracts 3 papers from India for plagiarism

October 5, 2010

Biotechnology Advances

 

 

Update 3: 7th August 2011 Kalasalingam University sacks Sangiliyandi Gurunathan

Update 2: 27th June 2011: Yet another

Sangiliyandi retraction  h/t JV Prasath


Update:

Links to the retraction notices have been added – 31st January 2011 and the links have been updated 22nd February 2011.

Biotechnology Advances has retracted 3 papers from India (2 from IIT Kanpur and1 from Kalasalingam University), all at the request of the editors and all for plagiarism.

A matter of some shame for Indian science and especially for the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. It remains to be seen if the Institutions take any action. The plagiarism seems to have been particularly inept since it included blatant copying even from Wikipedia and Encyclopedias.

The 3 retraction notices are given below:

1. Retraction notice to “Microbial production of dihydroxyacetone” [Biotech Adv. 26 (2008) 293–303] by Ruchi Mishra, Seema Rani Jain and Ashok Kumar

Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, 208016-Kanpur, India

Available online 22 August 2010.

Retraction Notice

Reason: This article has been retracted at the request of the editor as the authors have plagiarised part of several papers that had already appeared in several journals. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and we apologise to the readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.

From a limited, non-exhaustive check of the text, several elements of the text had been plagiarised from the following list of sources:

(more…)

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Posted in Biotechnology, Ethics, India, Science, Scientific Fraud | 24 Comments »

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