Plagiarism: Refuge of the imbecile

Plagiarism in India

The plagiarism saga continues in India, unabated. Maybe its the tip of the iceberg thats being witnessed. Possibly only foolhardy folks who try to publish stolen stuff in high-profile journals get caught. I know at least one case where a professor at the university at Hisar, Haryana was implicated in a plagiarism charge brought forward by scientists working in the Centre for Earth Science Studies, Trivandrum. But it never went beyond a preliminary enquiry, with the accusers taking a soft stance and not pressing their case.

The most infamous amongst all plagiarism cases has been that of V.J.Gupta, Prof of Paleontology in the Panjab University. His bluff was called by Prof Talent of Australia. The latest in this sequence is that of the case of Sri Venkateswara University Environmental Monitoring Laboratory 's chemistry professor, Pattium Chiranjeevi (chiranjeevipattium@gmail.com). He had the audacity to simply change the names of certain elements in journal articles and submit them in his own name, to Elsevier journals like Talanta, Food Chemistry, Journal of Hazardous Materials, Analytica Chimica Acta, and Chemosphere.! Elsevier has been in the process of developing a program called Cross-check which can detect plagiarism (as of Aug 2007, whether Elsevier uses the system is unknown). Elsevier is at pains explaining its anti-plagiarism steps, and admits that its a losing game, though it says that only 0.1% of submissions maybe fraudulent.

Nature (which has had its own imbroglios with fraud) has an article on the issue in its latest edition. [5 March 2008 | Nature 452, 15 (2008) | doi:10.1038/452015d, http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080305/full/452015d.html#comments]. The article says that Chiranjeevi was found guilty of plagiarizing or falsifying more than 70 research papers published in a variety of Western scientific journals between 2004 and 2007.

Jayanta Chatterjee of Reliance Life Science aptly comments in Nature that "One more committee, some more meetings, conferences, lunches and dinners at tax payers money. Indian science hardly has any accountability these days. No wonder the quality of science education and research in India is going down despite of increasing funding in recent past (according to many published reports). The disease lies deep in the society and the level of ability and honesty among scientific community in India (just like politicians and bureaucrats)."

P.Chiranjeevi is the Secretary of the Tirupathi Chapter of the Indian Society of Analytical Scientists and many of his papers can be found in a casual search on the internet like the one on "Spectrophotometric Determination of Fenpropathrin in its Formulations and Water Samples" in the E-Journal of Chemistry (http://www.e-journals.net) Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 480-486, October 2007, in which he reports that "novel spectrophotometric methods were developed for the
determination of fenpropathrin in insecticidal formulations and water samples ... "

As with Gupta, Chiranjeevi as the name implies will live on forever as Professor!!