New Delhi, Feb. 24: A chemistry professor in the temple town of Tirupati plagiarised published scientific work and passed off the research as his own to international journals, an investigation by Sri Venkateswara University has found.

Senior SVU officials said the university had taken disciplinary action against P. Cheeranjivi after a three-member investigation committee established that he had plagiarised several research papers.

“The committee found that plagiarism took place. The university has debarred him from guiding any research students, taking up exam duties, or holding administrative posts,” SVU vice-chancellor Choppala Ratnam said.

Cheeranjivi was not available for comment. But a member of the investigation committee said when Cheeranjivi had been given an opportunity to respond, he said he had done no wrong.

The scientific publisher Elsevier has retracted 13 papers authored by Cheeranjivi from its online database ScienceDirect. “The retraction was based on the investigation by the university,” Shira Tabachnikoff, a company spokesperson, said.

The SVU began investigations in mid-2007 after being alerted by Indian-American Purnendu Dasgupta, a chemistry professor at the University of Texas, Arlington, and editor of Elsevier’s journal Analytica Chimica Acta.

“A large volume of papers in a short span of time — some 60 papers between 2004 and 2007 — without proper equipment led to suspicions about the genuineness of the work,” the committee member, who requested anonymity, said.

A journal reviewer had shown Dasgupta irregularities in a manuscript submitted by Cheeranjivi. The paper was a near duplicate of an earlier paper by a Japanese team. “The Japanese paper was about chromium, and this paper was on arsenic. The rest of the paper was nearly identical to the Japanese paper,” Dasgupta said.

“It upset me because it was so blatant,” he said. “I wondered what kind of training could such a person give to young students,” Dasgupta told The Telegraph over the phone.

Dasgupta contacted the editor of another journal and found problems in some papers already published by Cheeranjivi. “One paper claimed experiments that would have required expensive instrumentation that we didn’t have even in our US laboratory,” Dasgupta said.

SVU had initiated action against the professor by October 2007 and also asked his research students to move other faculty members, a committee member said.

Elsevier said the other journals involved were Talanta, Journal of Hazardous Materials, Chemosphere and Food Chemistry.

The speed of SVU’s action contrasts with the pace of a probe into alleged scientific misconduct by biologists at the National Centre for Cell Science, Pune, said a member of the Society for Scientific Values, India’s science ethics watchdog.

An international biology journal had retracted a paper by a team at the NCCS last year, but an Indian committee had exonerated the team of any wrongdoing, raising suspicions of a cover-up.

The department of biotechnology then appointed a new panel of experts to examine the research and the findings of the earlier committee, but the final report is yet to be made public.

Elsevier said it was experimenting with tools that would be used in-house to help spot incidence of plagiarism. “We use software that mines articles and identifies similarities between papers,” Tabachnikoff said.

But she said the introduction of such technology was part of an ongoing process and was not specifically a response to the Indian case.