Ah... At last! A real post!
Yup. You wouldn't have imagined me (a guy with a perennial writer's block) to actually sit and type this blog. And yes... its extreme frustration that has driven me to blog!
The purpose of this blog: No particular purpose... its more like "just to keep a record of this incident"
So... here is the incident:
Sept 19th, 10 AM
I open my mailbox to find a mail from my close friend from my engineering college and my final year project partner there. The subject reads:
"Look at this..the cheap fello took our ug thesis and published a paper without crediting us"
"Uhh! Who? What? Where?" was my initial reaction. I visited the link that he had sent in the body of the mail to find the abstract of a paper published in an IEEE conference. (I had published the link here but removed it in 5 mins thinking of the implications it might have on the students whose names are up on the page)
I visted the link and found the title to be referring to our work in our final year project. The paper had been published by my project guide(that we did not seek or receive any guidance is a different issue) and lots of other names from my college, which I figured out were names of my juniors in college.
I read the abstract of the paper. A quick check on my project abstract(of which I have a copy in my mailbox) revealed that the abstract had been copied from my project abstract "verbatim" except for adding a few lines/ words.
The next obvious step was to check the content of the paper itself. The paper wasnt accessible free to me or to my project mates (Sudharsan(who brought it to our notice) and Vijay) and Vijay had to finally buy it to see what the contents were. Well... I wouldn't have even guessed this - it was ripped off our project report verbatim. Sentence for sentence, graphs, all copied right out of our report. Needless to say, we were furious. Sudharsan reported to the conference authorities that this was our work and that we hadn't been acknowledged for it.
We actually found that our names had been part of the paper (without us knowing it was being published!) initially when the paper was sent for approval. After approval our names were promptly removed and our juniors' names were added(apparently for a "price"! Talk about ethics!!). So there was this pdf giving details on the presentations to happen in the conference which had our names on the same site. We later found that fake email ids had been created for us in order to make the initial submission at the conference. Hey! Isn't that a criminal offence?!!
So we get in touch with a couple of our juniors who were part of this. They were pretty scared about the consequences as they had no clue that this was our work. They had been told that it was the work of 2 of their juniors, whose names were also obviously included in the paper. Our beloved project guide had said that he was in need of money to publish the paper in the conference and that he would include their names in the paper if they contributed towards the publication (this is getting better isn't it?).
One of the juniors we contacted quickly told the Prof(ok..assistant prof..whatever) that we had come to know of this (duh! obviously we would have found it someday. he keeps updating his page on the college site with his "published paper" list...and its fascinating for us to see him publish a new paper every week... like a factory producing papers. 30 papers a year in all unrelated fields! Now go to svce.ac.in and check the faculty pages in CSE department to find out who :) ). The prof calls up a friend of ours(Sai) whose number he knew to ask for Sudharsan's number. He tells Sai that this work was an improvement on our project. Sai tells him that we have purchased the paper and had a look at it and could not find any such improvements. Prof:"no pa.. we are working on improvements now". Ya rite!
Next he calls Sudharsan. He tries to convince Sudharsan that he had tried to contact us before publishing it and had in fact included our names in it before it got approved (which is true). He says that he could not contact us and hence removed our names from the paper. Now, this is certainly not a reasonable excuse. When he got into trouble it took him 20 mins to contact us. But before that he wasn't able to contact us and had create fake ids initially and then taken our names off. Not acceptable.
The purpose of this blog: No particular purpose... its more like "just to keep a record of this incident"
So... here is the incident:
Sept 19th, 10 AM
I open my mailbox to find a mail from my close friend from my engineering college and my final year project partner there. The subject reads:
"Look at this..the cheap fello took our ug thesis and published a paper without crediting us"
"Uhh! Who? What? Where?" was my initial reaction. I visited the link that he had sent in the body of the mail to find the abstract of a paper published in an IEEE conference. (I had published the link here but removed it in 5 mins thinking of the implications it might have on the students whose names are up on the page)
I visted the link and found the title to be referring to our work in our final year project. The paper had been published by my project guide(that we did not seek or receive any guidance is a different issue) and lots of other names from my college, which I figured out were names of my juniors in college.
I read the abstract of the paper. A quick check on my project abstract(of which I have a copy in my mailbox) revealed that the abstract had been copied from my project abstract "verbatim" except for adding a few lines/ words.
The next obvious step was to check the content of the paper itself. The paper wasnt accessible free to me or to my project mates (Sudharsan(who brought it to our notice) and Vijay) and Vijay had to finally buy it to see what the contents were. Well... I wouldn't have even guessed this - it was ripped off our project report verbatim. Sentence for sentence, graphs, all copied right out of our report. Needless to say, we were furious. Sudharsan reported to the conference authorities that this was our work and that we hadn't been acknowledged for it.
We actually found that our names had been part of the paper (without us knowing it was being published!) initially when the paper was sent for approval. After approval our names were promptly removed and our juniors' names were added(apparently for a "price"! Talk about ethics!!). So there was this pdf giving details on the presentations to happen in the conference which had our names on the same site. We later found that fake email ids had been created for us in order to make the initial submission at the conference. Hey! Isn't that a criminal offence?!!
So we get in touch with a couple of our juniors who were part of this. They were pretty scared about the consequences as they had no clue that this was our work. They had been told that it was the work of 2 of their juniors, whose names were also obviously included in the paper. Our beloved project guide had said that he was in need of money to publish the paper in the conference and that he would include their names in the paper if they contributed towards the publication (this is getting better isn't it?).
One of the juniors we contacted quickly told the Prof(ok..assistant prof..whatever) that we had come to know of this (duh! obviously we would have found it someday. he keeps updating his page on the college site with his "published paper" list...and its fascinating for us to see him publish a new paper every week... like a factory producing papers. 30 papers a year in all unrelated fields! Now go to svce.ac.in and check the faculty pages in CSE department to find out who :) ). The prof calls up a friend of ours(Sai) whose number he knew to ask for Sudharsan's number. He tells Sai that this work was an improvement on our project. Sai tells him that we have purchased the paper and had a look at it and could not find any such improvements. Prof:"no pa.. we are working on improvements now". Ya rite!
Next he calls Sudharsan. He tries to convince Sudharsan that he had tried to contact us before publishing it and had in fact included our names in it before it got approved (which is true). He says that he could not contact us and hence removed our names from the paper. Now, this is certainly not a reasonable excuse. When he got into trouble it took him 20 mins to contact us. But before that he wasn't able to contact us and had create fake ids initially and then taken our names off. Not acceptable.
posted by Arjun at
4:21 PM
3 Comments:
hey bro...it is infuriating to know to what unethical levels people can stoop to...that too least expected from a "teacher"... whoever said teaching is a noble profession...
I still think you should take legal action against the guy... don't let him off so easy...
By
Kavi, at 10:11 AM
WTF?!
By
AC, at 12:15 AM
Holy crap... If anything close to such things happened in the US, they would be black-listed, debarred from all University-related issues from anywhere and all their licences revoked and degrees voided. Plagiarism is a big crime here. While lifting off a couple of sentences may as well land u hell, I can't even imagine what would happen if someone ripped somehting off someone else's work.. verbatim, at that. I agree that u have GOT to take legal action and NOT let this go..
By
Anonymous, at 3:07 AM
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