My Blog

Rahul, has a detailed post and updates on the recent alleged Plagiarism from a group of researchers from Anna University, Chennai.

This has happened with in months of a similar allegation on researchers from NCCS, Pune, which resulted in retraction of the paper from JBC.

And you have to read the abstracts to find out, how 'Great minds think alike' literally while addressing a common topic. (that sarcastic quote has been plagiarized from Rahul's post :) ).

The original article in PNAS by Andersson et al Optimization of ionic conductivity in doped ceria

The alleged plagiarism in Journal of Materials Science by Muthukkumaran et al Determination of dopant of ceria system by density functional theory

Two of the authors out of four have already distanced from the article. Other two are now in a fix of not able to disown the article.

While JBC acted swiftly for the allegation last time by retracting the alleged paper, Springer who publish JMS, haven't yet removed the article... Seems like they are doing some brisk business over the unexpected popularity(!) of the article.

Anna University's future reputation lies with the action they are going to take on this case.

Seeji, Pharm House

Update (11/10/07) : Rahul has posted an update on this issue
Update (11/10/07) : A comment in Abi's blog which contains an alleged e-mail from Muthukkumaran K to the Swedish researchers
Update (11/10/07) : A news item in Linkoping university website on this plagiarism issue (via Abi)
Update (11/10/07) : Improbable research has picked up the issue in a small post, sarcastically linking it to the Infinite monkey theorem