Spanish scientists have articles pulled under Chinese plagiarism cloud

Was it a blunder, a really big mistake or out-and-out plagiarism? Officially, it is being termed "duplicate publication." In any case, a team of researchers at Vigo University, in the Galicia region, published two articles in the Journal of Chemical and Engineering Data last year, which it turns out are nearly word-for-word copies of the abstracts of two other articles published by Chinese scientists in 2007 and 2009.

Early this year, the US-based publication announced its decision to pull both Spanish pieces because "significant portions of these articles had been previously published by different authors" in other magazines. In March, Vigo University created an investigative committee to look into the affair.

The leader of the Spanish research team, Juan Carlos Mejuto, a professor at the Chemical Physics Department, told EL PAÍS that he accepts all responsibility for the case; he said that three of the paper authors were PhD students and two others were professors who contributed partially to the articles. Mejuto admitted to "bad practices and negligence" on his part, but said he had no intention of violating ethical norms. "I admit to a shoddy job but not to cheating; this was a mistake, not plagiarism."

His explanation was that they used the first paragraphs of the Chinese articles to help write their own work (citing trouble writing in English). Then, by mistake, they sent the magazine the original files, rather than the final articles written by themselves. After their publication, not one of the six authors bothered to re-read their work or alert anyone of the mistake.