In the past months, we have tried to solve a case of plagiarism, but without success. The process has brought the sobering revelation that plagiarism is deliberately ignored in a high-ranking journal like the Journal of Cleaner Production, which is published by Elsevier.
Plagiarism in its various forms is vile and deserves to be considered a form of research misconduct. This includes ‘compression plagiarism’, where the exact words are not copied, but the concepts and structures are. Identifying the presence and significance of any such plagiarism requires more than an automated tool. It doesn’t reflect well on a publication when editors can not spot where a paper is guilty of compression plagiarism. We have included links to two related items.
We contacted the Editors of JCLP and asked them to review this issue. After sending several reminders, we received a response in October, saying: “Our similarity check report shows that only 1% of similarity rate for these two articles. Therefore, we do not think there is possible plagiarism for the JCLP paper. However, there is indeed inappropriate citation, we will contact the authors and make a correction accordingly” [E-mail October 21, 2021].
Yet, the journal editors took no actions. We sent a reminder e-mail and received the following response in December: “After our editorial team’s internal discussion, we do not think there is any potential plagiarism regarding the article […]. “Although the JCLP article clearly uses the EPG paragraph (order and references), the JCLP paper is not using “their ideas or results,””.” [E-mail from December 10, 2021]