Nm2

A critical discussion of the publication by Nasrullah Memon, David L. Hicks, and Henrik Legind Larsen: How Investigative Data Mining Can Help Intelligence Agencies to Discover Dependence of Nodes in Terrorist Networks

in: R. Alhajj et al. (Eds.): ADMA 2007, LNAI 4632, pp. 430–441, 2007. Springer Berlin Heidelberg →ISBN 978-3-540-73870-1 →Download →Erratum

Report

The analysis presented here (as of January 14, 2014), including all documented findings of plagiarism, is available for →download.

Overview

The pages 430-440 of the paper have been analyzed. Page 441 contains only part of the bibliography and has been excluded:

Pages
430	431	432	433	434	435	436	437	438	439	440

All pages except for page 439 contain plagiarism. Clicking on the respective page number in the table above leads to the documentation of the text parallels on the corresponding page. On pages coloured in light red more than 75% of the text is plagiarized, on pages coloured in dark red between 50% and 75% of the text is plagiarized and on pages coloured in blue less than 50% of the text is plagiarized.

Illustration

The following chart illustrates the amount and the distribution of the findings of text parallels. The colours show the type of plagiarism diagnosed:

• grau="Komplettplagiat": the source of the text parallel is not given, the copy is verbatim.
• rot="Verschleierung": the source of the text parallel is not given, the copied text will be somewhat modified.
• gelb="Bauernopfer": the source of the text parallel is mentioned, but the extent and/or closeness of the copying is not made clear by the reference.

Prominent findings of plagiarism

• Fragment 430 28, Fragment 431 03: Three paragraphs of the introduction are taken from Katz et al. (2004), a publication that is not mentioned anywhere in the paper. The text is slightly adapted to give it a "terrorist feel", e.g. "Joe talks to Jane" in the source becomes "Atta talks with Khalid" in the paper.
• Fragment 432 31: 10 lines of text in Section 2 are taken verbatim without any attribution.
• Fragment 433 24: The authors cite themselves for a passage taken verbatim from Koschade (2005), who in fact quote another source for it.
• Fragment 434 01: A table is taken together with an eight-line explanation (Fragment 433 32) from a source not mentioned in the paper. The copied table is the one mentioned in an "Erratum" on SpringerLink.
• Fragment 434 04: Almost two paragraphs are taken from Koelle et al. (2006), a publication that is not mentioned anywhere in the paper. This includes all references to the literature (six in total).
• Fragment 440 16: More than half of the conclusions is taken verbatim from Stephenson & Zelen (1989), a publication not mentioned anywhere in the paper.

Statistics

• Currently there are 20 reviewed fragments documented that are considered to be violations of citation rules. For 18 of them there is no reference given to the source used („Verschleierungen“ and „Komplettplagiate“). For 2 fragments the source is given, but the extent of the used text is not made clear („Bauernopfer“).
• The publication has 11 pages that have been analyzed. On a total of 10 of these pages violations of citation rules have been documented. This represents a percentage of 90.9%. The 11 analyzed pages break down with respect to the amount of text parallels encountered as follows:

Percentage text parallels	Number of pages
No text parallels documented	1
0%-50% text parallels	6
50%-75% text parallels	2
75%-100% text parallels	2

From these statistics an extrapolation of the amount of text of the publication under investigation that has been documented as problematic can be estimated (conservatively) as about 46% of the main part of the publication.

• In all, text was taken from 12 sources.

Duplication

Most of the text of the paper has been recycled by the authors elsewhere:

• The entire Section 4 "Centrality Measures" as well as about half of Section 5 "Dependence Centrality" (i.e. p. 435:30-42, p. 436:all, p. 437:all, p. 438:1-30, p.439:5-10) are identical to the corresponding portions of Memon et al. (2007e) (retracted).
• A part of Section 4 "Centrality Measures" as well as about half of Section 5 "Dependence Centrality" (i.e. p. 435:30-42, p. 436:1-15, p. 437:26-35, p. 438:1-30) have also been published in Memon et al. (2008a)
• The entire Section 3 "Graph Theory" (p. 435:1-29) has also been published in Harkiolakis et al. (2008b)
• The entire Section 2 "Investigative Data Mining (IDM)" (p. 432:12-40, p. 433:all, p. 434:all) has also been published (in a slightly edited form) in Memon et al. (2008d) as well as in Memon et al. (2010d) and in Memon et al. (2011a)
• Large parts of the paper (p. 430:17-36; p. 431: all; p. 432:12-40; p. 433:1-2,13-22,31-38; p. 434:19-45; p. 436:9-39; p. 437:all; p. 438:1-30) have also been published in Memon et al. (2008e) (retracted)
• Substantial parts of the paper (p. 430:17-36; p. 431:1-28; p. 436:9-36; p. 437:all; p. 438:1-30) have also been published in Memon & Hicks (2008f) (retracted)
• A large part of Section 2 "Investigative Data Mining (IDM)" (p. 432:12-40; p.433:1-30; 434:33-42) has also been published in Memon et al. (2009a) (retracted)
• Some parts of the paper (p. 430:27-36; p. 431:1-9; p. 437:26-35) have also been published in Memon et al. (2011c)
• Fragment 433 24 can be found in 9 other publications:
  • N. Memon's PhD thesis (2007)
  • Memon & Larsen (2006a)
  • Memon & Larsen (2007a)
  • Memon et al. (2007c) (retracted)
  • Memon et al. (2008d)
  • Memon et al. (2008e) (retracted)
  • Memon et al. (2009a) (retracted)
  • Memon et al. (2010d)
  • Memon et al. (2011a)

Relevant Links

• Fragments showing plagiarism (20)
• Fragments showing text parallels that might not constitute plagiarism (2)
• All Sources (12)
• All Wiki-pages related to this documentation
• The extensive documentation of N. Memon's PhD thesis including an overview of all his terrorism-related publications up to 2011.
• Nm3, Nm4: The documentation of plagiarism in other papers of the authors.
• Press and Blog mentions related to this case
• General Press listings related to VroniPlag Wiki and its cases
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