In December, Solange Saxby, a postdoctoral research fellow at Dartmouth Health in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was notified by her friend of a paper published in the MDPI journal Nutrients that sounded similar to her dissertation.
While the corresponding author of the paper has called the omission of any citation to Saxby’s work “unfortunate” and said that she is working with Nutrients’ publisher – MDPI – to add one, the publisher said the behavior did not amount to plagiarism because the prior work was a thesis.
On Feb. 1, Saxby filed a report with the office of research compliance and ethics at North Carolina A&T State University. In an email thread Saxby stated her “intellectual property has been plagiarized and not properly cited.” A day later, Stephanie Evans, the director of the office, replied that she would review the allegations in the next 12 days, at which point she would “issue a determination” on how to proceed.
Over the next few months, Saxby received a handful of updates from Evans on the status of the investigation. In the most recent such message, sent May 28, Evans told Saxby the university was still conducting a “thorough investigation” of the complaint. In other publications, Saxby’s dissertation has been cited a total of six times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Meanwhile, Saxby has been trying – without success – to have the offending article retracted from Nutrients.
After months of emails, the members of the journal’s editorial board reached a decision on April 17. Shannon Zhao, the journal ethics specialist informed Saxby the journal would “resolve this situation by correcting the manuscript to add the citation of your paper.” But the journal has still not added the citation of Saxby’s dissertation, despite their statement in April. Zhao said that the correction would be “completed soon.”
