Amid criticism regarding almost regular cheating in research at the country’s tertiary level of education, a foreign blog reports an act of plagiarism by a Bangladeshi university teacher.
Retraction Watch, the blog reporting on retractions of scientific papers and on related topics, identifies him as Mohammed Shahab Uddin.
In academic publishing, a retraction is an action by which a published paper in an academic journal is removed from the journal.
Shahab Uddin is a neuropharmacology researcher whose publications abbreviate his first name as “Md,” and has published more than 160 papers since 2016 while associated with Southeast University, before beginning a PhD program at Hong Kong University.
He, however, requested to be withdrawn from the PhD program.
In mid-August, the High Court of Bangladesh formed a seven-member expert committee to formulate a guideline to prevent plagiarism in PhD thesis amid reports of cheating.
In Shahad Uddin’s case, the exposure all started with a tweet noticed by Leslie McIntosh, like many other denizens of Science Twitter, according to Retraction Watch.
McIntoshis is the CEO and co-founder of Ripeta, a tech company that offers automated tools to assess scientific papers.
McIntosh, the blog says, saw a tweet from a pseudonymous account in mid-March that bemoaned a journal’s lack of action after the owner of the account reported “an obvious case of plagiarism.”
The owner of the account had found a paper that was ripped off by his or her own research group while browsing the literature. “It isn’t just sentence copying, the whole structure and concept of the paper is THE SAME,” the account tweeted later in the thread.
McIntosh began looking into the paper and its corresponding author Shahab Uddin.
Working with a colleague, she shared her findings with the university, which quickly started an investigation. In the wake of the inquiry, Shahab Uddin — who did not respond to the blog’s requests for comment — requested to withdraw from the PhD program.
At first, McIntosh said she was just motivated by “curiosity” to do more research into him. She ran the paper accused of plagiarism through Ripeta’s automated checks for signs of publication integrity and reproducibility, which include analyzing funding statements, conflicts of interest, ethics statements, a study’s objective/hypothesis, data availability, code availability, and software analysis.
She also searched the Dimensions database for his other work and analyzed his public profiles on ORCiD and Publons.
Within days, Shahab Uddin apparently wiped his ORCiD profile, deleting all citations and references.
It felt like “things were moving fast,” McIntosh said, “and that meant mining as much information before information might be removed (which was the case).”
Using the Dimensions database, McIntosh found Shahab Uddin was listed as an author on more than 160 papers and book chapters published since 2016, and his work had been cited more than 3,600 times. Before his Publons profile was wiped, she saw he had more than 300 verified reviews.
Even that assessment of his productivity may be an understatement, according to a biography of him on the website of publisher IGI Global:
Md Shahab Uddin is a registered pharmacist and a research scholar in the Department of Pharmacy at Southeast University. He has published copious articles in peer-reviewed international scientific journals. He has also authored and edited seven books. He also serves as a guest editor, editorial and reviewer board member of numerous scholarly journals. He has developed five neuropsychological tests for the estimation of memory, attention, and cognition. He received his B.Pharm in 2014 from Southeast University.
His paper that sparked McIntosh’s investigation, “Exploring the Role of CLU in the Pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s Disease,” was retracted in May. According to the retraction notice in Neurotoxicity Research, the editors have retracted this article because a significant part of the content was paraphrased from another article by different authors (Foster et al. 2019). All authors disagree with this retraction.
Evangeline Foster, his corresponding author, said that the process with the journal had been “ridiculous and long-winded”:
Despite clear plagiarism which was noted by the journal it still took over a year for the retraction to be recorded.
McIntosh consulted with a colleague, Simon Linacre, about what to do to publish her findings. After emailing Shahab Uddin and waiting two weeks for him to reply, their next step was to contact Hong Kong University, where Uddin was enrolled in a PhD program.
On June 8, Linacre emailed Danny Chan, Hong Kong University’s Director of Education and Development of Research Integrity, following up on previous emails about McIntosh’s findings and asking if the university had done anything to address the concerns.
Chan responded the same day that the university was looking into the matter, and the next day said that the case would be referred to the university disciplinary committee.
At the end of the month, Chan wrote that the university investigation had concluded and made “recommendations” to Shahab Uddin. On July 7, a staffer notified McIntosh and Linacre that DDhab Uddin would withdraw from Hong Kong University, effective August 1.
McIntosh said she was “impressed” with the investigation:
But Chan declined to share details of the investigation and its findings with Retraction Watch.
When contacted by Dhaka Tribune, Southeast University Vice Chancellor AFM Mafizul Islam confirmed Shab Uddin was their student in 2016.
“We knew he owned a research farm but were unaware of the plagiarism,” VC Mafizul said.
If needed, action will be taken against him after a discussion with the chairman of the Department of Pharmacy, he concluded.