Plagiarism allegations surface against acting rector

The acting rector of COMSATS Institute of Information Technology in Pakistan has allegedly been found to be involved in plagiarised research work relating to a paper of which he was a co-author published in a national research journal in 2007, writes Rahul Basharat for The Nation.

According to the documents with The Nation, 65% of the text of the said research paper – “Wheat Genomics: Challenges and alternative strategies” – has been found to be similar to other papers after being subjected to the Higher Education Commission’s plagiarism detecting software Turnitin.

As per the commission’s policy, no research publication at PhD level should have a similarity index above 19% overall, and above 4% from a single source, an official said. “However the Higher Education Commission’s software mentioned a 65% index similarity, with top five individual sources from 5% to 10%,” said the official, who added that the content of the research paper has been taken from multiple sources and papers published between the years 2000 and 2003.
Full report on The Nation site