A Saudi engineer has lost his 2012 paper in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews for plagiarizing from two previously published articles, including one in the same journal.
The article, titled “Fresh water production from/by atmospheric air for arid regions, using solar energy: Review,” was written by A.M.K. El-Ghonemy, of Al-Jouf University.
According to the retraction notice:
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.
The author has plagiarized part of a paper that had already appeared in Water Res., 35 (2001) 1–22, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0043-1354(00)00247-5 and Renew Sustain. Energy Rev., 14 (2010) 1187–1201, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2009.11.014. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.
The Water Research paper was published in 2001 by Roland Wahlgren, of a Vancouver, B.C., outfit called Atmoswater Research. According to the abstract (just because it sounds interesting):
Atmospheric water vapour processing (AWVP) technology is reviewed. These processors are machines which extract water molecules from the atmosphere, ultimately causing a phase change from vapour to liquid. Three classes of machines have been proposed. The machines either cool a surface below the dewpoint of the ambient air, concentrate water vapour through use of solid or liquid desiccants, or induce and control convection in a tower structure. Patented devices vary in scale and potable water output from small units suitable for one person’s daily needs to structures as large as multi-story office buildings capable of supplying drinking water to an urban neighbourhood.
Evidently, El-Gohmeny thought so, too, because that’s pretty much how he described the technology:
In this paper, atmospheric water vapor processing (AWVP) technology is reviewed. These processors are machines which extract water molecules from the atmosphere, ultimately causing a phase change from vapor to liquid. Three classes of machines have been proposed. These classes are either cool a surface below the dew point of the ambient air, concentrate water vapor through use of solid or liquid desiccants, or induce and control convection in a tower structure.
Incidentally, Wahlgren’s article appears to have suffered a few spills. It picked up two corrections after publication, in May and July 2001, covering things like a misstatement of the Stefan-Boltzmann constant:
Page 11, second column, lines 5-6, the Stefan-Boltzmann constant should have been as follows: (5.67×10−8 W m−2 K−4).
to a misspelling of the word “expensive.”