Warning: (Center for) Advanced Modeling and Optimization, and a plagiarism case.

Since I described the plagiarism of one of our papers, one of the authors has been in touch to (a) apologize, and (b) confirm his agreement to retract the paper. He's been perfectly helpful, which is more than can be said for the editor of the journal in which the paper appears.

Both the author and myself have contacted him several times, without reply, so I'm now taking the opportunity to name both him and his journal. I do this in the hope that it will discourage potential authors from submitting papers to an operation that publishes plagiarised work and then refuses to even acknowledge the fact, let alone investigate it.

Advanced Modeling and Optimization is an "electronic international journal" edited by Neculai Andrei of the "Center for Advanced Modeling and Optimization" in Romania. It's rather obscure, but the fact that its content is freely-available means that papers it "publishes" will often be used in preference to others if authors have no access to better sources (one of the few down-sides of open access publishing).

As a result, the paper in question, containing swathes of our work, has attracted a fairly respectable 18 citations, including mentions in papers published in decent journals.

If you're thinking about submitting a paper to Advanced Modeling and Optimization (or even citing a paper in which it appears) I'd ask you to consider the scientific credibility of the journal, given its lax reviewing and non-existent quality assurance processes.

Big in Iran

(With apologies to Alphaville).

After yesterday's post on plagiarism, I didn't think it could get any worse. I was wrong.

Another search turned up a second Iranian remix of our (clearly legendary) 1997 paper on DNA-based Boolean circuits. Again, ours is on the left:

This version is due to Mahnaz Kadkhoda and Ali A. Poyan, of the University of Birjand and Sharood University of Technology respectively, and it appeared in the proceedings of the Second International Conference on Quantum, Nano and Micro Technologies (2008). Notice, once again, the direct copying of sections of text.

I've made the full versions of our paper and their paper available here, as they serve to illustrate the point made yesterday about a culture of "remixing" existing work, adding a little spin and then releasing it as one's own. Although there are differences between the two papers, they aren't technically significant. In this case, they've simply inverted our scheme, and thus claimed a new method which is "much faster and easier" (it isn't, as it still requires a fairly brutal gel extraction step).

But there's more.

By Googling a selected phrase from the original paper, we also find our text embedded in this paper, due to Zoraida, Arock, Ronald and Ponalagusamy, from the National Institute of Technology in India.

At this point, I've decided to give up chasing the matter, if only for the sake of my sanity. There are only so many rabbit-holes one can jump down in fruitless pursuit of plagiarists.

My worst plagiarism case yet

I've written before about having our stuff plagiarized. In the past, the cases I've found have been generally low-impact, in that the places in which the ripped-off material appeared have been low-key (eg. news articles, course materials). When contacted, the miscreants have either ignored me, or apologised. In this particular case, things got a lot more weird.

Full (and ironic) disclosure: the sections of the paper that were ripped off were actually written by my co-author, Paul Dunne.

A few years ago (in 2007), while searching for a reference to back up an assertion I'd made about NAND gates, I came across a paper on simulating Boolean circuits using DNA. "Looks familiar", I thought, and a side-by-side comparison shows just how similar it was to a 1997 paper I wrote with Paul (our paper is on the left):

At the time, I contacted the senior author, who I'll call Dr A, for reasons which will become clear shortly.

I received a response from Dr A, saying that there had been a "misinterpretation", and decided not to pursue it any further. However, I recently found myself coming across the paper again after following a different trail of references. According to Google Scholar, it's been cited 18 times in the past four or so years, which is a decent number. That's 18 citations to a paper that borrows large conceptual chunks from our original idea, as well as taking whole sections verbatim.

Happily for us, our original paper has been cited many more times than the plagiarized version, but I was rather annoyed to see this bastardised "ghost" version mopping up after it. So, I sent another email to Dr A; this time they sent me a fairly detailed response (on January 31 2012, the date is important), arguing how their method is subtly different to ours. I wasn't entirely happy with this, so I sent them the side-by-side comparison (above). Here's the response I got:

In the first slide, exactly above the highlighted text, I cited you paper. In second slide, I used some text from your paper in problem definition. The definition of Boolean network was very good in your paper and I used it. I thought, this kind of use is fair, and show the value of the paper (you paper).

It's true that our paper was cited, but the text was lifted without any form of quotation. Most telling is the explanation along the lines of "I liked it, so I took it."

I wasn't particularly happy with this, so I responded

I am pleased that you recognize that this is a case of plagiarism; I do not accept the "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" argument.

The response I got was quite shocking:

...unfortunately I have cancer and I'm dying and I do not live more than one month.

Huh. I responded to say "I'm sorry to hear that", and then left it, but Googled Dr A on a hunch.

It turned out that Dr A actually died in November of last year. I'm not naming her here directly, because I have no desire for her to show up in connection to a post about plagiarism when she is in no position to defend herself. Nonetheless, it seemed as if someone was posing as her, and responding to her emails through her official University account.

I responded:

I don't mean to be disrespectful, but I am sure that you are not Dr A. The reason I say this is that I believe she died at the end of last year. So, please explain who you are, and why you are continuing to use her email address. This is not about plagiarism now, it's more about establishing who I am actually speaking to.

The person then responded, explaining that they were an ex-student of Dr A (let's call him Mr M), and she had given them her email password prior to her death. Whether or not she had given them permission to pose as her is another question entirely.

I then pointed out to Mr M that he seemed to know a lot about the paper's contents, given that he was not listed as a co-author. His response:

I am a computer programmer. I wrote the programs of Dr. A's papers. For this paper, I wrote the simulation program for testing the algorithm.

So, this guy wrote some simulation code (the results of which are described in the paper), but wasn't listed as a co-author (or even acknowledged). He was paid for his services, I established later.

This all seemed pretty grubby to me at that stage, so I contacted the other author to explain what had happened. On the surface he was very angry, and told me that he had had Mr M's access to Dr A's email revoked. However, when I suggested to him that the paper should be retracted (as suggested for non-trivial cases of plagiarism), he fell strangely quiet.

Edit 9/2/12: He's agreed to retract the paper.

The reason that I'm highlighting this right now is that this week I received a paper to review, which came from Dr A's country (Iran). Without giving anything away, the paper contained several plagiarised figures from various sources, and drew far too heavily on a Ph.D. thesis with which I am familiar. I initially tried to dismiss it as coincidence, but then some cursory research into Iran's research culture led me here and here.

I was particularly struck by the observation in the Times Higher article that "People who are under pressure to get publications out sometimes look to research done in another language, add their twist to it and publish it..", which certainly seems to be the case here.

I don't feel qualified to comment on the complex political, cultural and social reasons for endemic plagiarism, but I very much doubt that tackling plagiarism is high on the Iranian government's agenda right now.

More press coverage for Pete

After last week's appearance in the Times Higher, I'm glad to see that Pete's research has been picked up by the local press. There's a pretty impressive shot of him in today's Manchester Evening News, accompanied by an article that does a decent enough job of presenting our work. Yakub Qureshi seems to give the impression that we've creating some big new piece of modelling software, when what Pete actually did was to analyse existing evacuation simulations using a novel technique based on information theory. This "mutual information" measure appears to have become conflated with the notion of "social forces", but I'm glad that the quote in the final paragraph was kept, as it accurately sums up what we did. I gather Pete is greatly enjoying his new status as an official "disaster expert".

Unfortunately, though, I appear to have forgotten the cardinal rule: when talking to a journalist, there is no such thing as an "off the cuff" remark. I remember vaguely mentioning the computer game The Sims, as a way of trying to get across the notion of agent-based modelling. Yakub has enthusiastically run with this idea, and, sure enough, there's a picture of The Sims 2. Why, I'm not sure. I don't think the next version will include smoke modelling or exit awareness profiling, but this has only served to remind me that tiny, inconsequential remarks will suddenly become the entire focus of the article, unless you're very, very careful.

Take this example, from the Liverpool Daily Post, April 22, 1998. I'd not long been awarded my Ph.D., which happened to be the first in the field of DNA computing. I was talking to a local reporter, and, while explaining the labelling of the bases making up DNA strands (A, G, C, T), pointed out, in passing, that the name of the film Gattaca (starring Uma Thurman) is a string over this alphabet (and, indeed, will be commonly found in the average human genome). When the final piece appeared, describing this complex scientific research, sure enough, there's a picture of... Uma Thurman.

Weeknote #46

There's been a bit of a gap since the last weeknote, mainly due to Christmas, followed by the start of term and the usual last-minute rush before a big European Commission funding deadline...

The crush paper I recently published with Pete and Steve has attracted a certain amount of media attention; the story (see the scan to the right) was used as the centrepiece in the campus roundup section of yesterday's Times Higher Education, and we're expecting local newspaper coverage next week. Apart from the obvious high quality of the science and the significant potential impact of the work ;-) I'm convinced that one of the reasons that the story has been given such prominence is that we published the paper in an open-access journal. If the paper had been buried away behind a journal paywall, I'm not sure people would have been so keen to cover it, and anyone who sees the story and searches for the work will be able to read it, whether they're affiliated to a University or not (and not be asked for $30 for the privilege, or whatever the going rate is...) Of course, we had to pay $1,350 to have the paper published (not considered for publication...), but we could have applied for a fee waiver had we been unable to find the money (and reviewers/editors don't know the payment status when they consider papers).

The proof is in the access statistics; the paper was published just over three weeks ago, and it's been viewed over 800 times already. It's been argued that the average number of readers for an academic article is about 5, so this is clearly an improvement!

Weeknote #45

Quite an eventful week; I was over in Brussels on Tuesday, as one of the two external reviewers of the SAPERE project. Quite apart from hearing about their results, it was quite interesting to see how another project operates in terms of management and so on. While I was away I received the formal notification that our paper on mutual information for crush detection (written with Pete Harding and Steve Gwynne) had been accepted by PLoS ONE.

The acceptance couldn't have come at a better time, as Pete had his Ph.D. viva on Wednesday. I'm delighted to report that he passed with minor corrections, so congratulations, Dr Harding!

Talking Turing

I did a few radio interviews last Thursday, ahead of the Turing/Morphogenesis event. Here's a recording of one of them, done with Heather Stott for BBC Radio Manchester. It's worth a listen, if only for the brief, stunned silence when I blurt out "He grew breasts!"