CHENNAI: Authenticity of over 200 papers published by researchers at Annamalai University, Chidambaram, has come under question after a ‘Science Integrity Expert’ said these papers contain manipulated text, images and data.
Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and a science integrity consultant periodically surveys academic papers for plagiarism, misconduct and fraud. She uploads her findings on her blog https://scienceintegritydigest.com and tweets the link.
On November 5, she had written a post on her blog titled 'Concerns about papers from Annamalai University'. “In my search for inappropriately duplicated images, I found a couple of papers from authors at Annamalai University with image concerns. As I was following different leads, I found more and more problematic papers,” she wrote in her post.
She, however, had added a note to her post stating, “This blog post expresses my personal opinion. It is not an accusation of misconduct.” She said she had spent around 2.5 months examining these papers and alerting editors of journals in which these papers had appeared. Her post also indicated that there were at least 14 papers in which the university’s incumbent Vice-Chancellor (VC), Velayutham Murugesan, is also an author.
Speaking to Express on Sunday, VC Murugesan said that he will depute the research director to look into the issue. “I cannot comment at this point without looking into the matter in depth,” he said. He said over the last couple of years, the varsity has tightened its standards on plagiarism. “We have brought in a software using which we check for plagiarism in all papers that have been published over the last two-three years,” he said.
A professor from the varsity, on condition of anonymity, said, for instance, sometimes plagiarism software pull out images showing various stages of an experiment as repetition. “We cannot prevent certain overlaps. Even if we check these papers she has pointed to, we can only look into it on a case by case basis,” the professor said.
Further commenting on the varsity’s reputation for publishing relatively large number of papers each year, Bik wrote, "...putting a lot of pressure on research departments to publish as many papers as possible might have led researchers to cut some corners, as we will see below."
In addition, she also pointed that “He (Murugesan) has made it mandatory for scholars to publish at least one paper in journals with impact factor which not only benefited the students but also the university in general.” In a separate post on November 8 titled, ‘More troubles at Annamalai University’, she has pulled out excerpts from the VC’s research work which showed repetitive use of the same image for different publications.
“This photo of striped nanoparticles that looks a bit like a laughing dolphin, for example, appeared to have been used in two different scientific publications to represent different concoctions. Here is a side by side comparison. In other papers, graphs appear to be showing the exact same background noise patterns,” she has written.