Strict monitoring: The cover of the current issue of the journal

New Delhi, Oct. 12: A flagship journal of the Indian Academy of Sciences has rejected 80 papers over the past three years and withdrawn a paper it had published earlier this year — all on the ground of plagiarism.

The journal Current Science has withdrawn a paper by a four-member team of pharmacy researchers at the Sri Ramakrishna Institute of Paramedical Sciences, Coimbatore, six months after it was published following peer-review scrutiny.

The paper by Krishnaswamy Muthusamy and his colleagues describes a class of substances called biosurfactants. But a detailed scrutiny of the paper by the journal’s editors revealed that a significant proportion of its content had been reproduced from a paper published independently by Ramkrishna Sen at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, two years ago.

Sen’s paper on biosurfactants had appeared in the journal Trends in Biotechnology, published by the international science publisher Elsevier. “A student co-author of our paper discovered the plagiarised work,” said Sen, an assistant professor of biotechnology at IIT Kharagpur.

The IIT researchers complained to Current Science and informed Elsevier. “Current Science said last month that it has withdrawn the plagiarised paper, but it can still be seen on the website of the journal,” Sen said.

Muthusamy, a faculty member at the Coimbatore institute, said two MPharm students who co-authored the paper had borrowed content from previously published work.

“It was a mistake by my students. I was unwell and could not go through the paper before it was sent to Current Science,” he said. “They didn’t realise what they were doing was wrong. We apologised and the paper has been withdrawn.”

In the past three years, Current Science has detected over 80 instances of plagiarism in various articles submitted by scientists, Krishnarao Raghavendra Rao, associate editor of the journal, had written in a commentary on plagiarism published earlier this year.

In one case, Rao has revealed, a scientist who had submitted an article on the use of lasers in the mining industry was unable to introduce any material on developments of lasers in India or in the scientist’s own laboratory.

A careful examination of the submitted paper showed that it contained many parts copied from external sources, Rao said in his commentary in Current Science.

Members of the Society for Scientific Values, an academic watchdog tracking issues of ethics and plagiarism in Indian scientific institutions, have long argued that India lacks adequate mechanisms to tackle such issues.