Some of India’s most reputed academics, including a vice chancellor and the director of a top Delhi engineering college, are under investigation for plagiarism.
More and more cases come to light as academics compete for funds
NEW DELHI: Some of India’s most reputed academics, including a vice chancellor and the director of a top Delhi engineering college, are under investigation for plagiarism, as the cancer of copying from other people’s work spreads across all layers of Indian higher education.
DNA had last week reported how a professor at the Sri Venkateshwara University in Tirupati had plagiarised 70 scientific papers, and published them in international journals, only to be finally exposed.
But the professor continues to teach at the varsity.
With no severe punishment for such academic fraud and in the absence of guidelines, Indian higher education institutions are witnessing massive spread of the malaise, because published scientific papers are key to promotions and good postings.
“Even researchers from some high profile institutes like the IITs are indulging in plagiarism,” says Dr KL Chopra, president of the Society for Scientific Values, which is dedicated to detecting scientific fraud.
Last week, the vice chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University, Prof PK Abdul Aziz, was asked to go on a long leave by the Uttar Pradesh governor till allegations that he copied his Phd thesis are refuted.
Dr Ranjit Singh, Director of one of India’s top engineering colleges, Netaji Subhash Institute of Technology in Delhi, is being investigated by the institute’s governing for allegedly copying the works of other scientists and claiming them as his own. Turn to
“What India needs are clear regulations and guidelines to deal with scientists who have been found guilty of misconduct in research or plagiarism,” says Dr KL Chopra, who is a former director of IIT Kharagpur. The Society for Scientific values exposed Prof Abdul Aziz and Prof Ranjit Singh.
The copying disease is not limited to a few high profile cases. It’s a national malaise. The leading science journal in the country, Current Science, published by the Indian Academy of Science, caught 100 plagiarised papers in the last one year.
Editors of various journals published by the Academy have now officially started instructing review editors, independent referees and peer reviewers on how to prevent plagiarism in the scientific literature emanating from India.
“My editor sent me an official e mail about preventing plagiarism in the Journal of Biosciences. Besides stressing on a scientific methods to test originality, the e-mail talked about software and freely available web-based tools that can detect copied works,” says DR Shaheed Jameel, a virologist.
Besides publishing his own original research, Dr Jameel goes through almost 20 scientific papers a year as a review editor for the Journal of Biosciences.
To publish a paper a scientist has to first come up with an original piece of research. The scientist then writes down the assumptions, the initial set of conditions, and the proposed aim of the study. This is followed by detailed step-by-step narration of the entire experiment with relevant details about the instruments, data and chemicals.
The expected quality of a paper is that anyone can get the same results by re-creating the conditions mentioned.
The finished paper is submitted to a journal, whose editor then forwards it to a review editor who looks for possible errors. The paper is also passed on to peers of the author for review.
Once the paper has been checked at the two levels, it is published in a journal. Experts point out that though the process seems fool proof, it is far from it.
Indian science, according to experts, has become a highly competitive arena in the last five years. Researchers are under pressure to show results for a piece of the growing pie of foreign donations.
The director of the Indian Institute of Science Prof P Balram in an editorial in Current Science, first highlighted the problem in 2005. Prof Balram, who is also the editor of the journal, said awards, grants, promotions and recognition seem to depend critically on how many papers a scientist publishes. This, he said, led to “increasing corruption”.
With there being no deterrent punishment, the unethical among the scientific community indulge in such practices with impunity.
“We may be able to pin point how a certain professor has copied the work of others, but there is nothing one can do beyond that. India does not have a ethical policy on scientific research,” sid Dr KR Rao, associate editor, Current Science.
According to Dr Rao, whose article on plagiarism will appear in the March 10 issue of Current Science, a surge in competitiveness has led to Indian scientists copying the works of others.
In the article, Dr Rao makes his case by citing numerous instances of plagiarism by Indian scientists, but he does not name the scientists. “The idea is to make scientists aware of the dangers of plagiarism. Not to publicly hound them,” he said.
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