Springer Finally Retracts Conference Paper

As reported here, VroniPlag Wiki determined in the course of investigating the doctoral thesis of Nasrullah Memon, awarded by the Aalborg University in Denmark in 2007, that very many papers in which he was co-author were also plagiarized. Denmark is still deciding what to do with the thesis, the last time I wrote to the authorities (August 2013) they were still deliberating, although I have heard that one of the co-authors of many of the papers has been cleared of charges of scientific misconduct. This I do not understand. If you are a co-author and the paper is plagiarized, you are a plagiarist as well in my opinion, or else you just put your name on a paper you didn't write, which is just as bad.

IEEE finally retracted some of the papers in January 2013, while Springer continued to sell the plagiarized papers for a hefty fee. Both the researcher at VroniPlag Wiki and I have written to Springer asking what is happening here. It seems they were unsure what to do in this case, although IEEE does have a policy that might be able to be adapted.

While surfing over Christmas the VroniPlag Wiki researcher stumbled over this:

Retracted: How Investigative Data Mining Can Help Intelligence Agencies to Discover Dependence of Nodes in Terrorist Networks
Nasrullah Memon,
David L. Hicks,
Henrik Legind Larsen

Okay, progress is being made! We wanted to look at the retraction notice, as most journals do give some sort of an explanation of why the article was retracted. RetractionWatch even collects wordy euphemisms for "plagiarism". But Springer wanted $30 from us to see the retracted paper. Hmm. Not even my university database would let me see the retracted paper for free, and we used to subscribe to exactly this series online.

If you click on "Look inside" you get to see the first page:

Well, I guess a watermark is a start. But it is still listed in the ACM Digital Library, ResearchGate, Google Books (only the first page, p. 430, was removed there), dplp, etc.
It has also been quoted 17 times, according to Google Scholar, 6 of which are papers for which Memon is not co-author, although some have published in the past together with him.

Memons's official publication list at the University of Southern Denmark only has the "newest" publications (including one for 2014 already), so many of the retracted ones have disappeared. But one of the IEEE retracted ones is still listed there:

It's bad enough that the publishers who earn good money for these publications are dragging their feet in deciding what to do. But how do we get retracted papers out of the body of science? That's the big problem and one of the reasons why plagiarism is so bad.

Suggestion to Springer: Please get going on the other papers, five of which are quite substantial, and print the reason for the retraction(s), free of charge.

 

Multiple Retractions of Articles by Computer Science Professor

VroniPlag Wiki case #23 was the dissertation in computer science of Nasrullah Memon, who is currently a professor at the University of South Denmark. The dissertation was submitted to the Danish University of Aalborg in 2007. VroniPlag Wiki documented extensive plagiarism not only in the dissertation (64 % of the pages), but also in many publications involving Memon. The publishers IEEE and Springer were informed of the problems.

IEEE has now retracted eight papers involving Memon, seven of them on the basis of the VroniPlag Wiki documentation:

1. "Detecting New Trends in Terrorist Networks," by Uffe Kock Wiil, Nasrullah Memon, and Panagiotis Karampelas in the Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), August 2010, pp. 435-440 is a plagiarism of "Social Network Analysis and Information Fusion for AntiTerrorism" by Pontus Svenson, Per Svensson, and Hugo Tullberg in the Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Civil and Military Readiness (CIMI), May 2006 and Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques (second edition),
   by Jiawei Han and Micheline Kamber, Morgan Kaufmann, Elsevier, 2006. The lead author, Nasrullah Memon, was found to be solely responsible for the violation.
2. "Detecting High-Value Individuals in Covert Networks: 7/7 London Bombing Case Study," by Nasrullah Memon, N. Harkiolakis, and David L. Hicks in the Proceedings of the IEEE/ACS International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications, 2008, pp. 206-215.
3. "Detecting Key Players in 11-M Terrorist Network: A Case Study," by Nasrullah Memon and David L. Hicks in the Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, 2008, pp. 1254-1259.
4. "Practical Algorithms and Mathematical Models for Destabilizing Terrorist Networks," by Nasrullah Memon, David L. Hicks, Dil Muhammad Akbar Hussain, and Hendrik Legind Larsen, in Military Communications Conference, MILCOM 2007  is a plagiarism of "Untangling Criminal Networks: A Case Study" by Jennifer Xu, Hsinchun Chen in Proceedings of the First NSF/NIJ Symposium Intelligence and Security Informatics, ISI, June 2003 and "The Exploratory Construction of Database Views"  by M. N. Smith, P. J. H. King, Research Report BBKCS, School of Computer Science and Information Systems, Birbeck College, University of London, 2002. The lead author, Nasrullah Memon, was found to be solely responsible for the violation.
5. "Harvesting Terrorists Information from Web," by Nasrullah Memon, David L. Hicks, and Hendrik Legind Larsen, in the Proceedings of the 11th International Conference Information Visualization (IV'07), 2007, pp. 664 - 671 
6. "Detecting Critical Regions in Covert Networks: A Case Study of 9/11 Terrorists Network," Nasrullah Memon, K. C. Kristoffersen, David L. Hicks, and Hendrik Legind Larsen, in the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on  Availability, Reliability and Security, (ARES 2007), 2007, pp. 861-870 is a plagiarism of "Clique Relaxations in Social Network Analysis: The Maximum k-plex Problem" by B. Balasundaram, S. Butenko, I. V. Hicks, S. Sachdeva
   Posted online, January 2006 and "Network Analysis of Knowledge Construction in Asynchronous Learning Networks" by Aviv, Reuven; Erlich, Zippy; Ravid, Gilad; Geva, Aviva in the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, Vol 7, No 3, 2003
7. "Practical Approaches for Analysis, Visualization and Destabilizing Terrorist Networks," by Nasrullah Memon and Hendrik Legind Larsen in the Proceedings of the First International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES’06), 2006, pp. 8xx - 913 is a plagiarism of the same sources as number 4.
8. "Novel Algorithms for Subgroup Detection in Terrorist Networks," by Nasrullah Memon, A. R. Qureshi,  Uffe Kock Wiil,  and David L. Hicks in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES '09), 2009,  pp. 572-577 is a plagiarism of "Balancing Systematic and Flexible Exploration of Social Networks" by Adam Perer, Ben Shneiderman in the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 12, No. 5 Sept/Oct 2006, pp. 693-700 and "Mining for Offender Group Detection and Story of a Police Operation" by Fatih Ozgul, Julian Bondy, Hakan Aksoy in the Proceedings of the Sixth Australasian Data Mining Conference (AusDM 2007), Gold Coast, Australia. Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology (CRPIT), Vol. 70, December 2007, pp. 185-189 and Smith and King from number 4 above.

Searching the IEEE database there are, however, 133 papers by Memon, and of course many more involving the co-authors, some of whom are prestigious Danish professors. The VroniPlag Wiki documentation also lists papers published by Springer, as well as dubious conferences and/or publishers such as WSEAS, Inderscience, or Worldcomp. Springer says that they are still investigating.

When interviewed by the Danish weekly newspaper Weekendavisen in May 2012, Memon had insinuated that dark powers had manipulated his thesis in order to discredit him. However in the face of the documented plagiarism in many other papers, it seems that a more detailed investigation into his publications needs to be mounted. The problem is, who will take action? Who has the time? It took over six months for IEEE to withdraw the publications after the plagiarism was clearly documented on VroniPlag Wiki. At least IEEE has a procedure for dealing with allegations, but it seems to take far too long, in particular because these papers have been cited, and not only in self-citations.

When will the University of Aalborg take action? Hicks, Wiil, and Larson are professors there. Hendrik Legind Larsen and Hsinchun Chen (the author of a work that was plagiarized in number 4) were members of Memon's doctoral thesis committee.When will the University of South Denmark look into the situation? Memon is advising doctoral students there, organized a conference on counterterrorism in Odense, and is a journal editor. Do the retractions have any consequences at his university?

According the the IEEE policy on good scientific practice,  a level 1 violation means that > 50 % of the paper is plagiarized, resulting in a retraction notice being printed and the authors banned for 3-5 years from publishing in any IEEE publication. It seems that more than one of the papers retracted are level 1 violations. Will the publication ban be consecutive? That is, if there are 3 level 1 violations, will Memon be banned from publishing for 15 years?

I am glad that IEEE has finally taken action (and there are over 500 notices of retraction in the IEEE database). But there are so many questions raised that I fear will not be answered.

A French Puzzle

An anonymous correspondent dropped this link into my box this morning: Imposture à l'Université ?

Google Translate lets me know that this is a bit of a French puzzle. Professor Imad Saleh of the University of Paris 8, lists as an important paper in a CV:

Meziani Rachid et Saleh Imad (2011), « Towards a collaborative business
process management methodolgy [sic] », ICMCS ’09, IEEE, 6-8 April 2011
Maroc, 8 pages (article indexé).

That is, a paper from the 2009 conference ICMCS sponsored by IEEE in 2011. Okay, that might be a typographical error. The ICMCS'11 did take place in Morocco, but from 7-9 Apr 2011. Okay, off-by-one is normal for computer scientists.

The article posts a link to that paper. And it posts a link to a paper written by Rachid Meziani and Rodrigo Magalhães from the Center for Organizational Design and Engineering in Lisbon, Portugal in 2009: Proposals for an Agile Business Process Management Methodology.

Shall we compare the abstracts with the VroniPlag Wiki SIM_TEXT comparison tool?

(You can click on the picture for a larger view)

Needless to say, the article continues pretty much word for word, table by table, picture by picture.

Saleh is professor and the director of PARAGRAPHE, an interdisciplinary research laboratory attached to the doctoral School (N°224) Cognition, Langage and Interaction (CLI) of the University of Paris 8. There is no Meziani listed there or at the web site of the University of Paris 8. There is a Rodrigo Magalhães to be found in Kuwait, and he does BPO, but there is not a complete bibliography listed there.

So the French Puzzle is: why are these two papers identical? What happened to Meziani and Magalhães? There has been a case submitted to the French Council on Universities. It is interesting to note that Saleh is a member of that council. 

And if I may add a question myself - why do we continue to prize conference publications in computer science? We can't tell the mock conferences from the substantial ones, and plagiarism seems to be rampant because the peer-review systems is dead for conferences.

VroniPlag Case 23 had to withdraw IEEE Paper

An interesting find in the extensive IEEE database of retracted papers (Search Google for "Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication Principles" site:ieee.org, there are more than 24.000 entries) on VroniPlag case 23: A paper on the topic of the dissertation, published by the author after the dissertation, that had to be retracted on account of plagiarism:

Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication Principles (link)

"Novel Algorithms for Subgroup Detection in Terrorist Networks" by Nasrullah Memon, Abdul Rasool Qureshi, Uffe Kock Wiil, and David L. Hicks in the Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, March 2009, pp. 572-577 

After careful and considered review of the content and authorship of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE's Publication Principles. This paper contains significant portions of original text from the papers cited below. 

The original text was copied with insufficient attribution (including appropriate references to the original author(s) and/or paper titles) and without permission. (more).

I think the entire publication history of these authors needs to be looked at a little bit more closely. Especially since Memon, Hicks and Wiil all still list the withdrawn publication on their publication lists, and they seem to publish a lot together. Only Qureshi doesn't have the paper listed.

I informed the rector of the Aalborg university about the VroniPlag case on April 20. I still have not had any indication that my email was received, so I suppose I shall have to write again.