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RePEc plagiarism accused offenders: Arshia Amiri and Bruno Ventelou

Identification

Name: Arshia Amiri
Affiliation at time of decision: GREQAM
Name: Bruno Ventelou
Affiliation at time of decision: GREQAM and SE4S

Facts

Note: some links may turn invalid over time, especially if the committee has requested some works to be pulled.

Arshia Amiri & Bruno Ventelou, 2010. "Causality test between health care expenditure and GDP in US: comparing periods," Working Papers halshs-00520326, HAL. (local copy)

Wolde-Rufael, Yemane, 2004. "Disaggregated industrial energy consumption and GDP: the case of Shanghai, 1952-1999," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 26(1), pages 69-75, January. (local copy)

Wolde-Rufael, Yemane, 2006. "Electricity consumption and economic growth: a time series experience for 17 African countries," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 34(10), pages 1106-1114, July. (local copy)

Amiri and Ventelou plagiarizes both works of Wolde-Rufael:

There is no reference to Wolde-Rufael's work.

Response of accused offenders

Response from Bruno Ventelou:
Facts are correct. I am very embarrassed. I am discovering Wolde-Rufael paper and the plagiarism.
I can give the context, without the intention to be excused. As a coauthor I would have to be much more attentive.

1/ Arshia Amiri is a PhD student in Shiraz university. I help to supervise his research work by email and did not meet him physically. Arshia has never been included in our PhD students program at Greqam, in which we strongly prevent students from using any form of plagiarism

2/ Indeed, I had been alerted in 2010 by a (third) co-author that Arshia had used plagiarism in another paper. I immediately informed Arshia of deontological rules and I firmly asked Arshia to suppress all plagiarism. All published works after 2010 must be clean.

3/ I did not imagine that this working-paper, already online, also included a plagiarism. The fact that this is a working-paper series, not a complete publication, is a possible explanation (not a justification) for a weak vigilance of my part.

I propose:
-to modify the incriminated working-paper. This modified paper will precise that a preliminary version was using plagiarism. We will present apologies to professor Wolde-Rufael in the modified paper. I need one week to modify the paper.
-to present directly my apologies to professor Wolde-Rufael

I will wait the decision of the RePec committee, if there is any other thing to do.

Arshia Amiri reponds:
I ask you to correct my unpublished paper MPRA_paper_33955; Forecasting the role of public expenditure in economic growth Using DEA-neural network approach. I have changed this in order to clear it from plagiarism. The changes are highlighted in Blue color. I do apologize and my co-author know nothing about this fault of me. Please make attached file as my unpublished working paper.
Here is the corrected paper, and here is a local copy of the original.

Committee decision


YES Notification of offender superiors
YES Notification of editor published plagiarising work
YES Request of removal of plagiarising work
YES Notification of afflicted author(s)
YES Notification of afflicted editor
___ Banning of author from RePEc Author Service
YES Publication on RePEc plagiarism page

Further developments

Response from Nicolas Gravel, Director of GREQAM:
Many thanks once again for alerting us on the plagiarism of Arshia Amiri and some of his colleagues, including the full member of GREQAM Bruno Ventelou. As I wrote yesterday, the two co-directors of GREQAM (Anne Péguin-Feissolle and Alain Venditti) and myself had today a thorought meeting with Bruno Ventelou. From this meeting, we reached the conclusion that Bruno Ventelou was unaware of the plagiarism of the paper that he co-authored with A. Amiri, even thought we all aggree that Bruno was faulty of not having paid a sufficient attention to the precise wording of the paper. Hence we concluded in the good faith of Bruno Ventelou on this particular case.

However, we also reached the conclusion that A. Amiri was guilty of rather serious professional malpractice that we have decided to sanction in the following manner:

1) Bruno Ventelou can not anymore be the co-supervisor of Arshia Amiri. Moreover the later will be excluded from the doctoral school of Aix-Marseille university (to which he is indirectly linked through the co-supervsion agreement). As such, A. Amiri can not anymore be the member of GREQAM (and of Aix-Marseille School of Economics who has replaced GREQAM on the REPEC website as the affiliation of the GREQAM, the DEFI and the SESTIM researchers). Starting from today, any future claimed institutional affilication to GREQAM or to the Aix-Marseille School of Economics by Arshia Amiri will be considered fraudulous by the direction of GREQAM.

2) All GREQAM working papers involving A. Amiri will be removed from the archives and replaced by the following warning: "This working paper is not any more available because of a strong suspicion that it was containing plagiarization of works by others".

3) A new code of conducts for our doctoral students - now managed within the Aix-Marseille School of Economics - will be set up. This code of conduct will state explicitely that any doctoral student proved guilty of plagiarism in a written document presented as suitable for scientific diffusion will be excluded from GREQAM and from the Aix-Marseille School of Economics.

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