Saturday, May 9, 2009

"A Chinese Scam"

Europe's Life Science journal Lab Times reported a case of plagiarism with an analysis article titled "A Chinese Scam." Its byline summarizes the story:
Fred Schaper from the Technical University of Aachen, Germany, gives a talk at a Keystone Meeting. A couple of months later he discovers the figures he presented in a fresh paper. The author is a Chinese who also attended the meeting.
The article chronicles the entire incident. Fred Schaper had given a speech of his research at the Keystone Meeting in January 2007 and then, on August 6, 2008, he found a preview of a to-be-published paper contained several figures that appeared to be his used during the speech. The authors of the later paper were a group of Chinese from Lanzhou University, led by Yang Jinbo (杨金波).

Fred Schaper launched an investigation effort that involved the editors of the journal Cellular Signalling, the organizers of the Keystone Meeting. Yang Jinbo had first responded by claiming that he had repeated Schaper's experiments himself, obtained the same results, but neglected to cite Schaper's work. But confronted with strong evidence, Yang Jinbo eventually caved in and "admitted that all the figures in question had indeed been pirated." Someone had downloaded the data from the computer at the Keystone Meeting for them. He promised to destroy all data and promised never to work in this field ever again.

There seems to be no mention of this incident in the Chinese media. A search on the schoo's web site failed to turn up any hits on the name Yang Jinbo.

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