HEC recommends action against ‘plagiarising’ professor

LAHORE: The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has told the Lahore High Court that it has recommended action against Punjab University’s Dr Zulfiqar Ahmed Bohra for plagiarising two research papers published in 2014.

During the hearing on Thursday of contempt petition against the authority for not initiating action despite approval, an HEC official said the commission wrote a letter to the Punjab University to take action against the assistant professor in light of its plagiarism policy.

After reviewing the research articles, the HEC said there was sufficient proof of plagiarism to initiate the process of investigation. Accordingly, the University of Punjab was asked to investigate the matter through its plagiarism standing committee and forward its findings and recommendations to the HEC within one month.

In its reply, the HEC stated that after the LHC’s instructions on the petition of Imran Saeed, on December 1, they arranged a personal hearing of the petitioner and Dr Zulfiqar, who first expressed his inability to appear due to the short notice but then came along.

Imran came with evidence and shared two suspected articles titled ‘An Empirical Investigation of Downsizing: A Study of Banking Sector of Pakistan’ that was published in African Journals of Business Management on May 7, 2014, and ‘Role of OCB in the relationship of POS, Psychological Empowerment and Intentions to Quit: Evidence from Malaysian Hotel Industry’ that was published in the Proceedings of the First Middle East Conference on Global Business, Economics, Finance and Banking on October 10, 2014.

He alleged that Dr Zulfiqar and co-authors copied significant portions of both these papers from ‘Employee Downsizing of the Banking Sector in Portugal: A Case Study’ by writer Franco Gandolfi, and ‘Mediating Role of Organisational Citizenship Behaviour in the Relationship of POS, Psychological Empowerment and Turnover Intentions’ written by Ishtiaq Ahmed, Muhammad Zeeshan-Shaukat and Muhammad Ramzan published in 2013.

In his application, Imran stated that both papers were checked through Turnitin and showed similarity index of 36% and 23%, respectively, after excluding bibliography and quoted material.

He submitted the LHC chief justice had directed the HEC chairman to decide the complaint against Dr Zulfiqar within one month but the order was never implemented over a period of more than two months.

Imran had alleged the authorities were reluctant to take any action against the assistant professor.

Source: The Express Tribune