An example of academic plagarism

This post is going to describe a case of academic plagarism that I found while investigating the use of fuzzy logic in modelling PMV for HVAC control. I will walk through the various sections of text and diagrams that have been lifted from the victims, as well as showing several obvious mistakes made by the perpetrators due to lack of attention. To simplify referencing in the text, I have assigned each paper a one or two character name: P, V1, and V2. These are noted below.

Perpetrator

• (P) Elizabeth Amudhini Stephen, Mercy Shnathi, P. Rajalakshmy, and M. Melbern Parthido. Application of fuzzy logic in control of thermal comfort. International Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, 5(3):289–300, 2010.
  

Victims

• (V1) Maher Hamdi, Gérard Lachiver, and François Michaud. A new predictive thermal sensation index of human response. Energy and Buildings, 29(2):167–178, 1999.


• (V2) Yadollah Farzaneh and Ali A. Tootoonchi. Controlling automobile thermal comfort using optimized fuzzy controller. Applied Thermal Engineering, 28(14–15):1906–1917, October 2008.

Original content

The full sum of original content (that I can determine) in P is the sentence "Fuzzy PMV is used instead of Fanger's PMV" on page 290 and the word "(fuzzy)" on page 298. That is a total of nine words in a 12 page paper. There are also two figures and a table on pages 294 and 295 which I cannot find elsewhere, but these are not mentioned in the text and do not appear to add anything content-wise. Everything else in the paper is directly lifted from either V1 or V2 with only a couple of minor edits (and sometimes obvious edits are not made, but more on this later).

Origin of plagarised content

This section lists which of the two victim papers each part of P came from.

• V1
  • Section 2 (parts B, C, D, and E).
  • Figures a and 4.


• V2
  • Abstract.
  • Sections 1, 2 (part A), 3, 4 (parts A and B), and 5.
  • Figures 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 11, and 12.
  • References list.

Obvious mistakes

Due to the direct copying of content from two other papers and the lack of attention paid to the result, there are many obvious mistakes in the paper. A summary of these is given below.

• The PMV equation and all figures are pixelised (some quite badly) due to lack of access to the original markup or vector-based images.


• The first figure is lettered as 'a', the remaining figures are numbered.


• The figures are out of order (Figure 4 comes before Figure 3) and some numbers are skipped (Figures 1, 6, 8, and 9).


• The text references non-existent Figures b, 6, and 8.


• The text references a non-existent Table 4 (no numbered tables exist in the paper).


• The references list is (incompletely) taken from V2. This means that a citation in the text from V1 points to a paper that doesn't exist in the references list.


• Of the 28 references copied from V2, only four are actually cited in the text.


• The copied text has mistakes arising from incorrect text extraction (presumably from the original PDFs) or later attempts to fix such errors.


• Inconsistent notation and notation that appears unexplained.


• Mentioning of experimentation on page 295, with no description of the experiments or results discussion. Figures 2 and 3 were originally part of the results discussion, but are not referenced in the text here.

Amusing aside

While plagarism is not a funny topic, I can't help being amused at this: V2 cites V1, meaning that P accidentally cites one of the papers it was plagarised from (though for a very minor point and without mentioning the author names).

Summary

Absolutely no effort was made to hide the plagarism of other work, leading to a paper that is inconsistent and largely meaningless.