Dr. Zang is a professor of psychology at a European university. She supervises several domestic and international doctoral students. One of the students spends most of the time in her home country in Asia. This means that the professor does not have that frequent contact with the student, but when they meet at conferences around the World, they always have good working sessions, and the work appears to progress afterwards. There is, however, one aspect that has bothered Zang lately. The e-mails from the doctoral student, Ms. Lee, wherein the beginning well written, and grammatically correct, but lately, the quality of expression has clearly deteriorated. Zang suspects that Lee has had someone to help her with writing. It seems obvious that Lee’s English language skills are not at a level where she could independently produce text. Zang, nevertheless, continues to work on an article draft of a study, which she designed together with Lee at one international conference in Australia a year and a half ago. Lee has conducted the study according to the plan in her home country. The writing process, however, is slow and Lee seems unwilling to put in a further effort to work with the text, but would like to submit the paper. Dr. Zang has had to maintain several times her standpoint to Lee that the paper is not ready for submission yet, but needs substantial work before submission. Time passes and things do not seem to progress.

Then, Zang receives a request to review a manuscript submitted for publication in an Asian-based scientific journal. Based on the manuscript she recognizes this to be the text she and Lee have been working on. She asks Lee why she has submitted it despite professor Zang’s advice not to do so before the text is ready. Lee answers that she has not submitted the manuscript. Zang recalls her earlier suspicions that someone is helping Lee with the language. Could this person have submitted the paper?

Questions:

  • Could this be a case of plagiarism?

  • What should Dr. Zang do next?

  • What is the role of the Editor of the journal, and what kind of reaction could Dr. Zang reasonably expect from the editor?

  • What information is needed in order to proceed with the case?

  • What would be the procedure for investigating the case?


Last modified: Tuesday, 12 March 2019, 2:06 PM