The academic pressure to increase the quantitative output of peer-"reviewed" publications is ever increasing, despite all the talk that one cannot measure cognitive work in the same way as industrial production (i.e. in terms of out-put numbers). The effect is an increased rate of crappy papers and plagiarism, not just by students, but also staff. Now, stuff of mine has been plagiarized!
The offending paper is:
Actor Network Theory and Social Science: possibilities and implications and was published in Journal of Public Administration and Governance, Vol 1, No 2 (2011) pp. 158-164
It contains extensive, verbatim excerpts of a paper of mine:
Actor-Network-Theory and Communication Networks: Toward Convergence, 1997
This was written as a grad student, 14 years ago, but currently ranked as # 6 on Google when you search for the term "actor network theory". So not hard to find (if my bubble is any measure).
Normally, I don't really mind people re-using my stuff and I don't keep track of it. But within academia, where the norms of re-use are not onerous, and citations are central to its particular mode of knowledge production, the case is different.
The new paper just reeks of someone whipping up something uninteresting to add another line to his CV, and this by someone who sits on the board of the journal. Ts, ts, ts,
Update 30.01.2012 I notified the editor of the journal, Saleh Ahmed, who replied immediately saying that they would investigate the issue. So far, nothing happened and my email inquiring about the state of the inquiry was not replied to. I wonder if I have to escalate the thing.
Update 20.03.2012 It seems like the journal took the paper down. The link now simply redirects to the main page. No traces left. That seems the way adacemia deals with plagiarism these days. Remove and forget about it.
