Plagiarism Alert
Just a while ago I came across something extremely bizarre and disturbing: the strangest case of plagiarism. Someone has parts of my PhD thesis and/or possibly entire sections including figures from papers I had published (with my advisor and collaborators) more than ten years ago, made some small seemingly random changes, and published multiple papers. That too as recently as 2019!
I completed my PhD from International Institute of Information Technology — Bangalore (IIIT-B) under the supervision of Prof. Srinath Srinivasa. My PhD thesis entitled “Designing optimal network topologies under multiple efficiency and robustness constraints” was published in 2011. You can access it here through the Shodhganga portal. You can find more of our work on Google Scholar.
Today, while working on something I had to look up some old research work that I had done a long time ago. That’s when I came across these cases of plagiarism. With a quick search I found two such instances. There might be more.
One of the papers published in International Journal of Innovative Technology and Exploring Engineering (IJITEE) in 2019 is entitled “Designing Optimal Network Topologies with Numerous Robustness and Efficiency Constraints” (The “authors” have replaced “under multiple” with “with numerous”). You can access the paper by clicking this link. Other details: ISSN: 2278–3075, Volume-8 Issue-7, May, 2019. The first author is a research student and the second author is apparently an Assistant Professor at a university, who is likely the supervisor of the former.
This is a screenshot of some of the figures from the above paper. I remember spending tens of hours painstakingly creating these.
You can find the original work in Chapter 5 of my thesis. A term I had used was “Symmetric Multi-hubs”. They have changed it to “cruciform multi-hubs”. But that cleverness does not always come in handy it seems. They call the other classes of topologies as “purposeless hubs and spokes” and “purposeless CSL”. I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.
The same authors have published another paper with plagiarized content in a journal called International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering (IJRTE). It’s called “Designing Optimal Network Topology Based on Genetic Algorithm Framework”. Other details: ISSN: 2277–3878, Volume-8, Issue-1, May 2019. You can access it by clicking this link. This features parts of Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 of my PhD thesis. Interestingly, the authors do cite three of my papers, but that doesn’t absolve them of blatant plagiarism.
While I figure out the next steps I have to take to deal with this strange and counterproductive scenario, I can’t help but feel extremely sad about the state of affairs in Indian academia. We need high quality universities with students and professors conducting research with passion and integrity. This kind of behaviour is the antithesis to those ideals.