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Iranian politician moonlights as scientific plagiarist

It appears that one of the plagiarists caught by Harold Garner’s Deja Vu web database, “author” of a paper, 85% of which was stitched together from five papers by other researchers, is Massoumeh Ebtekar, former spokeswoman for the militant students that held 52 Americans hostage in the US Embassy in Tehran during the Carter administration, former vice-president under Mohammad Khatami, and current member of the Tehran City Council.

Nature, my source for this news, reports that she has blamed this on the student who helped her with the manuscript. This would seem to indicate that the student wrote most or all of the paper, despite not being listed as an author…which is a different kid of plagiarism, if one more widely accepted in academia.


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