Einstein and Klein, Plagiarism

 Einstein and Klein

Albert Einstein certainly knew Oskar Klein’s paper of 1926, and yet a year later he submitted for publication his own paper on unified field theory reproducing Klein’s results, but without even mentioning Klein. Apparently, this was brought to his attention. In the finally published paper, at the end, Einstein added this comment:

“Mr. Mandel told me that the results that I have presented here are not new. All of the content is contained in the work of O. Klein.” (italics mine)

Unconscious “Borrowing of Ideas”

It is all too human, we tend to forget, especially when we like something, and we like to produce our versions and to forget about originals. This happens not just in science. Music composers are known for that even more.  (For some good cognitive science studies on this universal tendency, see Timothy Wilson’s “Strangers to Ourselves” and Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, fast and slow.”) But where is justice? Where is fairness?

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a weed

There are also cases of a willful plagiarism. I was involved as one of the “detectives” in one such case in 2011. Dr. Camelia Ciobanu, holding a position of a university lecturer at the Naval Academy in Constanta, Romania, was found committing repeated plagiarism. Here is what I wrote about the case to the Executive Editor of a major mathematical review journal, with whom I was corresponding at that time:

Dear X,

Although you did not ask me about my view of the whole story, nevertheless I would like to share with you the results of my thoughts during the last two days. These thoughts somehow crystallized after learning more and more details about the case, and then contemplating.

I think that the point is not to make a big story out of this one case. The actual real damage is not that big. Yes, we have plagiarism, but cases of plagiarism are well documented in the history of music - some great composers were also plagiarists - they simply loved a particular piece, written by someone else, so much, they wanted to own it!

Making a big issue of the case of one naive plagiarist, when not much real damage followed, will simply tell others not to be so naive.

Rather, the community should be made aware that similar cases happen, especially in some environments (The Naval Military Academy of Constance is here an example), therefore better preventive actions should be taken in the future.

Of course each alleged case should be thoroughly researched, because this is the only way we can learn the truth about how science and scientists behave in reality. Knowing is better than not knowing.

In short: I am for learning from this particular case about what steps will make the decision “to plagiarize or not to plagiarize” somewhat more difficult in the future. I hope I am not offending you by sharing my thoughts with you.

Best wishes,

Ark

Today we can find on the Internet several announcements like this one:

Note from the Editor (see also this):

It is very difficult for us, since a lot of people are involved in working in the benefit of our journal, to do the following announcement concerning three former issues of ASUOC.

The papers listed bellow, published in 2000, fasc.1 and 2003, fasc. 1 and 2, namely:

- Ciobanu, Camelia: ”Representations of the Lie algebra sl (2)”, An. Stiint. Univ. ”Ovidius” Constanta, Ser. Mat., 8, No. 1, 59-66 (2000);

- Ciobanu, Camelia: ”The Lie algebra sl(2) and its representations”, An. Stiint. Univ. ”Ovidius” Constanta, Ser. Mat. ,11, No. 1, 55-62 (2003);

- Ciobanu, Camelia; Coltescu, Ion: ”Vanishing results for semisimple Lie algebras”, An. Stiint. Univ. ”Ovidius” Constanta, Ser. Mat., 11, No. 2, 51-56 (2003),

are retracted because they were copied verbatim or translated into Romanian, from the book ”Quantum Groups”, published by Professor Christian Kassel in GTM, 155, Springer Verlag, New York, 1995, xii+531 pages, ISBN 0-387-504370-6.

We are very sorry that we did not see this before, in spite of the peer-reviewing system applied since the second volume of our journal.

We do not agree with such things and any further papers submitted to our journal by the above two authors will be rejected.

We express our deep apologies for this situation to the author (Ch. Kassel), to the Editors of Graduate Texts in Mathematics Series at Springer Verlag, to Springer Verlag, to our readers, to Zentralblatt fur Mathematik and to Mathematical Reviews.

We have already put a remark about this retraction in each incriminated issue on the web site of our journal.

and

FROM THE EDITOR:

The papers of the author Camelia Ciobanu are (morally) excluded from all the issues of the present journal no matter where they appeared (even if we have not the means to do this physically). This is done both at the request of the author and at the decision of the Editorial Board, because some of them were plagiate.

We will inform the mathematical data bases that are reviewing our journal about this decision. Mrs. Camelia Ciobanu will not publish ever in our journal. We refer specially to the following papers:

1. Ciobanu, Camelia, Something about Frattini subalgebras of a class of solvable Lie algebras, An. S¸tiint¸. Univ. “Ovidius” Constant¸a, Ser. Mat.9, No. 2, 9-16 (2001), which is too close to the paper Stitzinger, Ernest, Frattini subalgebras of a class of solvable Lie algebras, Pac. J. Math. 34, 177-182 (1970),

and

2. Ciobanu, Camelia, About relationship between generalized structurable algebras and Lie related triples, An. S¸tiint¸. Univ. “Ovidius” Constant¸a, Ser. Mat. 15, No. 1, 47-53 (2007), which is taken from Kamiya Noriaki, On generalized structurable algebras and Lie related triples, Adv. Appl. Clifford Algebr. 5, No. 2, 127-140 (1995).

We are grateful to the Editors of the Mathematical Reviews for informing us about these situations. There are now some years since we changed our policy of selecting the peer referees such that they are active researchers in the topics of the papers sent to them. Moreover we reject a paper having a negative report (from three).

Let us express our deep gratitude to the peer referees for avoiding such situations to our journal in the last three years.

 So, in this case plagiarism was discovered and justice was partly done; whether it was adequate, I can’t say. But how many cases of plagiarism are never discovered?

Plagiarism in science is a weed. Weeds have to be removed with their roots:

"Dig them up by the roots

Use a garden fork or a hand trowel, and gently lever them out of the soil, aiming to remove all of the root system to prevent rapid regrowth."

 

Dig them up by the roots

In the particular case described above the Naval Academy did not impose the consequences, did not fire the plagiarist. What was the result? We read (translation from Romanian):

"Camelia Ciobanu, from the Naval Academy, convicted of bribery, wants to return to her teaching position 

The former teacher from the Mircea cel Bătrân Naval Academy, convicted in the bribery case, can no longer bear to stay away from the chair. Camelia Ciobanu was sentenced on July 6, 2018 to three years of suspended prison and a 5-year ban on the right to exercise the teaching profession for committing the crime of bribery.  "

Tolerance in such cases not only does not produce positive results, but also brings harm.

Coming next: Religion and Science – cruel Gods: War

P.S.1 In 2016 Camelia Ciobanu coauthored a paper:

Marcelino Belecciu, Camelia Ciobanu, Irina Cristea

Coast Guard-Romanian Border Police, Naval Academy, Constanta, University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia 

How To Use The Ordinary Mathematical Models In The Military Field 

Abstract: This article’s aim is to provide quick solutions in the case of military operations, more precisely it will  be  emphasized  the  fact  that  we  can  use  mathematical  algorithms  of  graph  theory  to  determine  the optimal  length  of  roads  in  a  mission.  Specifically,  the  Elementary  Algorithm  (of  Bellman)  in  the  area  of military operations in Iraq is used to determine the shortest route between two cities ...

P.S.2. Three papers coauthored by Camelia Ciobanu can still be found on Researchgate. Personally I wonder what was her real contribution to these papers?