We’ve already reported on the retraction of a paper in a business ethics journal for plagiarism. Yes, plagiarism in an ethics journal. But it turns out there’s at least one more case of exactly the same thing, albeit in a different business ethics journal.

Here’s the notice from the Journal of Business Ethics:

The Editors and publisher regret to report that the paper published by Eugene Z. Geh as ‘‘The ‘Strong’ versus ‘weak’ premise of stakeholder legitimacy and the rhetorical perspective of diffusion’’ in the Journal of Business Ethics Online First, 25 March 2012, DOI 10.1007/s10551-012-1281-y includes several passages (about 16%) that duplicated passages published earlier by Sandy Edward Green as ‘‘A rhetorical theory of diffusion’’ in the Academy of Management Review (2004), 29(4):653–669. This is a violation of publication ethics which according to the Springer Policy on Publishing Integrity warrants a retraction of the article and a notice to this effect to be published in the journal.

Geh is a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. The director of the doctoral program, Andrew Wicks, tells Retraction Watch:

There was an extensive investigation done and all the evidence pointed to an isolated incident that was a mistake rather than a calculated effort to plagiarize. Based on the results of that investigation, JBE opted to provide the lightest form of action at their disposal and we opted to take no additional action beyond extensive internal conversations.

Wicks was Geh’s professor for Foundations of Business Ethics, a course in which Geh earned a grade of Distinguished Performance.

Speaking of available punishments, Mohammad Asif Salam earned a five-year publishing ban for duplicating his own work in the same journal.

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