Plagiarism

Abstract

Because of our long-standing interest in malaria/HIV co-infection in pregnant women, we were initially pleased to learn that the Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene had published a new review of this topic. However, upon reading this paper by Uneke and Ogbonna1 we were dismayed to find that many sentences had apparently been copied intact, or very closely paraphrased, from at least 16 other previously published review articles and research reports. The unattributed quotations and close paraphrases (summarized in Supplementary Table 1) comprise over 3000 words of Uneke and Ogbonna's paper.

Extensive use of unattributed quotations is part of the definition of plagiarism. The Committee on Publication Ethics, for example, defines plagiarism as “unattributed use of large portions of text and/or data, presented as if they were by the plagiarist”.2 To the best of our knowledge, this definition of plagiarism applies equally to research reports and other types of papers.

We have great respect for the Transactions. However, we disagree with the decision to proceed with print publication of the Uneke and Ogbonna paper, for the reasons cited above. We had requested that the paper be retracted after reading the electronic version available on Science Direct.

We are grateful to the Editor for extending us this opportunity to express our dissenting opinion.