University of Hyderabad vice-chancellor Appa Rao Podile faces an embarrassing situation as it has come to light that three review papers which he had published before being appointed as V-C had plagia
University of Hyderabad vice-chancellor Appa Rao Podile faces an embarrassing situation as it has come to light that three review papers which he had published before being appointed as V-C had plagiarised content. Two of the papers were published by him in 2014 and the third in 2007.
Most of the plagiarised content is in the paper “Root Colonisation and Quorum Sensing are the Driving Forces of Plant Growth Promoting Rhizobacteria (PGPR) for Growth Promotion”, published in the Indian National Science Academy journal in June 2014.
This paper has six plagiarised statements. One of the statements was lifted verbatim from the book Bacteria in Agrobiology: Plant Probiotics, edited by Dinesh K. Maheshwari and published by Springer. In the other two, one statement each has been used without providing citation, of which one is from his own paper, written in 2005.
When contacted, Prof. Podile said, “The papers were just review papers. There is no need to retract them. No claim was laid on anyone else’s research findings.”
In one of the papers my student used a sentence from her own paper. I contacted the editor of the journal which published the review papers, Prof. Lakhotia of Banaras Hindu University. He said that since the similarity is less and as very few sentences appeared without citation, a statement may be given in the next issue that it was due to an oversight which the authors regret. It is being called plagiarism, there is no limit. When the papers were submitted software for anti-plagiarism was also not in use, had it been in use it would have been known then itself.”
A former senior UGC official said on condition of anonymity, “An inquiry committee should be appointed to look into it and decide the seriousness of the plagiarism based on which the chancellor of the university or visitor can take a decision. No plagiarism should be taken lightly, but, at the same time, there are levels of plagiarism and as soon as someone is found to have committed it, he should not be crucified (sic).”
