… and found his own work. Under that person’s name.
That person is Dongqing Li, at the University of Waterloo. Li has now been found guilty of plagiarism and will suffer the hideous consequence of four months without pay. Let that be a warning to any other evil-doer!
January 8th, 2013 at 3:08PM
“Four months without pay.”
Otherwise known to some of us as ‘summer.’
January 9th, 2013 at 1:03PM
Hi, I followed up on this, since I teach freshman writing and am always looking for instructive examples of what plagiarism is and what it can lead to. The case is not so simple; it appears that a graduate student co-authoring the article with Li may have actually perpetrated the plagiarism and that he accepted responsibility for it. If true, this raises the question whether he actually read the paper before it was published under his name as senior author. Both the original and the plagiarized article were review articles, not pretending to contain original research. So it’s still plagiarism, but with mitigating factors that suggest to me that the four-month penalty was not unreasonably lenient.
January 9th, 2013 at 1:26PM
David: I appreciate the comment. I’d take issue, though, with your conclusion. One of the most entrenched aspects of scientific scholarship involves senior scientists putting their name on articles they have had absolutely nothing to do with. If it’s not ghostwriting an article your graduate assistant has written, it’s allowing pharma to ghostwrite an article under your name touting the effectiveness of one of its pills. The behavior has much to do with endemic fraud in scientific research. It’s a seriously cynical, irresponsible, and destructive practice, and anything that can be done to discourage it should be done. A semester without salary doesn’t exactly cut it.