Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Paper by former vice-president of Iran retracted

Nature reports that a "review paper by Massoumeh Ebtekar, the former vice-president of Iran and an immunologist at Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran, is to be retracted from an Iranian journal following allegations that it was almost entirely stitched together from other scientists' papers."

NatureNews: Butler, Declan. Iranian paper sparks sense of deja vu - Allegations of plagiarism prompt journal to retract report. Published online 22 October 2008 | Nature 455, 1019 (2008) | doi:10.1038/4551019a (http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081022/full/4551019a.html)
The plagiarism is one of more than 70,000 entries in the Deja Vu database. Powered by a tool called eTBLAST, it collects similar articles from the various scientific journals indexed by Medline. It takes an abstract, searches for similar ones, and then compares them, determining which one was published first. This blog noted a previous case in January 2008.

There are a shocking number of papers that are exact duplicates (but published in different journals), or have the same abstract but are published in different languages, or are identical but have different authors. Deja Vu is run by the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and is funded by the Hudson Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

This is a great service to the community!

1 comment:

  1. dears
    the paper in which revealed that iranian scientists and phisicians used other scientists scientific tought is a disaster in which another time it was revealed in iran fars faschisms make scientist s and phisicians to rub other scientists tought and the worlds scientists must help iranian scientists and phisicians.

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