León, Angel & Serna, Gregorio & Rubio Irigoyen, Gonzalo, 2004. "Autorregresive conditional volatility, skewness and kurtosis," DFAEII Working Papers 2002-06, University of the Basque Country - Department of Foundations of Economic Analysis II. Published in the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, pages 599-618, vol. 45(4-5), September 2005. (local marked copy).
The first item copies verbatim several excerpts from the second one. The second is quoted, but not in a way that lets the reader know the copied parts come from it.
Note: some links may turn invalid over time, especially if the committee has requested some works to be pulled.
We identified the parts that were present in a previous paper and we noticed that we mentioned and discussed the work realized by the other researchers. However we missed to mention that some paragraphs were taken from this article and we also missed to mention this article in the references section. This is clearly an oversight and we regret it, of course we would have wanted to list the paper in the references, after we have discussed it in the literature review section and we also intended to specify the paragraphs taken from the paper by a footnote, as we did in other instances when it was the case - One of the paragraphs is nothing else than part of the abstract of the mentioned paper.
Finally, we need to emphasize the fact that the work deals with the use of data from the Romanian capital market in order to investigate the power to forecast the signs of the returns and that the data, methodology, results and conclusions are ORIGINAL. The literature review simply revises previous work that is related to the work mentioned in the paper. We acknowledge as our only mistake the failure to include the discussed paper in the references and to indicate by a footnote the paragraphs taken from it. However, we mention that we are both members of the editorial committee of the Romanian Economic Journal and we could rectify our oversight if you would consider it necessary.
As Editor of the Romanian Economic Journal I have reviewed the case you brought to my attention.First let me express my apologies to the Editor of the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance and to the authors of the article "Autorregresive conditional volatility, skewness and kurtosis", for the situation generated by this accusation!
After careful consideration of this issue I agree with the decision made by the Plagiarism Committee of RePeC and support the idea that this paper does not have to be retracted from our journal.
I have seen the quantitative analysis, the Matlab codes and the database that was used in this research, which testifies the originality of the paper. The presence of the four paragraphs in the literature review section, which make the present issue, does not impair significantly the added value of the article, which is the result of a serious research work.
In my opinion this could be considered a case of ( culpable) negligence rather than a case of (intentional ) plagiarism. This does not mean that the negligence should be taken lightly and the authors admitted and appreciated the rightness of the Plagiarism Committee of RePeC approach. Still taking into account the value of the paper and the dedication for research of these young authors I wonder if the Committee could reconsider the decision of placing them on the website with plagiarism offenders.
In addition, I wish to inform you that Mr. Radu Lupu is no longer member of the Editorial Committee of the Romanian Economic Journal.
Sincerely,
Ioan Popa