Dr. Özlem Durmaz Incel, a co-author, discovered the following paper yesterday, which turns out to be entirely a verbatim copy of three papers from my group: http://www.ijmra.us/project%
It's a very sad incident, reflecting very poorly indeed on the authors. Here is a copy of the letter I sent to the Editors of this Journal on behalf of my co-authors, with more details:
Dear Editor,
I’m writing about a paper which has been published in your“International Journal of Management, IT and Engineering” In July2012, titled “Strategies Of Data Collection In Tree-Based WirelessSensor Networks” authored by “Nita V. Jaiswal, Vishal S. Dhole, Prof.D.M.Dakhane and Harshal N. Datir”, pages 390-408. This paper isplagiarized verbatim from my group's previous work, specifically twojournal papers (published in the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computingand ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking) and a chapter in a book published by Springer.
Without a doubt, the paper is an exact copy/paste version of our previous studies; both the text and the figures are copied. The paper does not include any new material, aside from a different title.
This is terrible and completely unacceptable, an instance of the worst kind of scientific misconduct. This paper should immediately be withdrawn with a public notice of retraction and the authors should be censured in the strongest possible terms for their shameful behavior.I urge you to take the necessary actions urgently. Please confirm at the earliest your receipt of this letter, and let us know what actions you will be taking in response.
I’m also cc’ing this message to editors of the journals and the bookchapter where our previous papers were published as well as my co-authors. We intend to explore other actions that can be taken to settle this serious matter.
The follow is a list of the plagiarized papers:
1. TMC: Ozlem Durmaz Incel, Amitabha Ghosh, Bhaskar Krishnamachari,and Krishnakant Chintalapudi, Fast Data Collection in Tree-Based Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol.11, no. 1, pp. 86-99, Jan. 2012, doi:10.1109/TMC.2011.22:http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10. 1109/TMC.2011.22
2. Book Chapter: Ozlem Durmaz Incel, Amitabha Ghosh, and Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Scheduling Algorithms for Tree-Based Data Collectionin Wireless Sensor Networks, Book Chapter: Theoretical Aspects of Distributed Computing in Sensor Networks, Nikoletseas, Sotiris; Rolim,José D.P. (Eds.), Springer, 2011.http://www.springerlink.com/content/j458602844010nu3/,http://anrg.usc.edu/~amitabhg/ Scheduling-Survey-2010.pdf
3. TON: Amitabha Ghosh, Ozlem Durmaz Incel, V. S. Anil Kumar, and Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Multi-Channel Scheduling and Spanning Trees:Throughput-Delay Trade-off for Fast Data Collection in Sensor Networks, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Volume: 19 Issue:6, pp.1 731 - 1744, Dec. 2011: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2011.2146273
In the attached file, we have marked each individual section and addednotes from which paper they have been copied. Below you can find asummary of which section is copied from which paper:
- Abstract Section: First 2 sentences are copied from the bookchapter, 3rd sentence is copied from the TMC paper.
- Introduction: All the text is copied from the book chapter and the TMC paper.
- Related Work: All the text is copied from TON and TMC papers.
- Section 1.1 and Section 1.2 are totally copied from the book chapter.
- Section 1.3 (Degree Constrained Trees) is an exact copy of Section 5.2.3 of the TMC paper and Section 1.3 (Assignment of Time Slots) is an exact copy of Section 4.1.2 of the TMC paper.
- Section 2 and 3 are copied from the book chapter.
- Section on “Multi-channel Scheduling” is an exact copy of Section 5.2 of the TMC paper.
- Section on “Future Research Directions” is an exact copy of Section 4 of the book chapter.
- Conclusion is copied from the TMC paper.
Sincere regards,
Bhaskar Krishnamachari
-----------------------------------
Bhaskar Krishnamachari
Associate Professor and Ming Hsieh Faculty Fellow in Electrical Engineering
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
http://ceng.usc.edu/~bkrishna/
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update 1: The link for the paper is now down. I got the following email from an unnamed "Editor in Chief". There is no public notice of retraction or censure of the authors as we had requested:
Dear Sir
We are very sorry for this inconvenience.
Thanks for your information we are going to d-link this paper with our website till next decision.
Thank you
With Regards
Editor in Chief
www.ijmra.us
editorijmie@gmail.com
info@ijmra.us
update 2: The story just got even richer. Brian Cheung dug around and found yet another paper by a different set of authors that is also a clearly plagiarized version of one of these papers. As Matt Welsh pointed out on my blog, a dead giveaway is the presence of fuzzy images. See for yourself: http://www.iccce.co.in/Papers/ICCCECS482.pdf (plagiarized from http://www.princeton.edu/~amitabhg/papers/TMC-Jan2012.pdf).
Note: This is not the first time I've noticed papers of mine being plagiarized. Given that it involves authors at relatively unknown institutes publishing in relatively unknown conferences and journals, one is generally inclined to conserve one's energy for more important causes and simply ignore these incidents. Still it's a pity that these should go completely unremarked. A few public incidents may bring greater awareness of plagiarism, bringing some light even to these dark corners of the academic world...
