The Nonlinear Optics Web Site

A Case Study in Plagiarism

In 2003, I was contacted by a journal editor who was suspicious that an author had submitted a paper that was almost identical to mine. The photograph below shows (left) a figure from the submitted manuscript and the same figure (right) from my paper. The two images are identical, down to the noise. The authors removed some lines from the original figure (and some of the incomplete erasures show through!) to make it look a tad different.

Click here for the full manuscript that was submitted to the journal and compare it to the published article by Kuzyk and Dirk.

A "transcript" between the plagiarizer, his dean, the journal editor and myself will follow. Of course, the names have been changed to keep the identities of the offending parties confidential.

Click here to view the approximate sequence of events that brought this case to my attention, and eventually lead to the dismissal of a University professor.