Professor A suspected that technical researcher B had plagiarised a chapter of a book in a joint article and marked X as the first author of the article without their consent. The university conducted an investigation proper after receiving a statement (2019:18) from TENK. The investigation proper revealed that the case involved a total of four publications, all of which dealt with the same research results. B was an author for all four publications. X could not be contacted during the investigation proper.
Based on the rector’s decision, B was found guilty of both disregard for responsible conduct of research and plagiarism. In order to rectify the consequences of the RCR violation, the rector decided that the university would contact publishers to have both the article and the book chapter removed from the publication channel.
Joint article co-author C article was dissatisfied with the rector’s decision to contact the publisher and requested a statement from TENK on the matter. TENK handled the matter in the statement TENK 2021:22.
In TENK’s opinion, the review article inadequately and inappropriately referenced previous research results. However, the criteria for plagiarism were not met, as B was the author of each article in the case in question. The discovered misconduct could not therefore be used as a justification for removing the article from the publication channel.
TENK also issued a second statement on this decision by the rector (TENK 2021:22).