Plagiarism and self-plagiarism used to be an easy way for career advancement for many ruthless and entitled academics. It became a bit more difficult now, in the times of internet where automatic software can flush out a cheater in a matter of minutes. Provided of course, the scholarly publishers care about such things. And in fact, many don’t. My regular contributor Smut Clyde now presents you the case of two medical plagiarists from Naples in Italy, who became infamous after one of them was caught having stolen the work of a US colleague he was peer reviewing. In other cases, the two Napolitans were even too lazy to plagiarise. They simply republished their already plagiarised “works” several times, and not just as some pedestrian papers, but as book chapters, all in order to boost their publishing record even further. Smut Clyde alerted the journals, but most of them couldn’t care less. To their defence: some are known predatory publishers.
And these are the two Plagiatori di Napoli: Giovanni Tarantino , born 1946, likes to present himself as “Professor of Internal Medicine” at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, thought the university website has no records of his faculty membership. He was apparently a subordinate group leader there for 20 years till 2005 and might have had afterwards an adjunct professorship under a Napoli faculty member Giovanni Di Minno, whom Tarantino invited to join the plagiarism game. Their common paper in Oncotarget disappeared from the internet without a trace when the misconduct became known. Tarantino’s junior partner in the plagiarism scam is Carmine Finelli, educated at the same university, last (allegedly) affiliated with the hospital Stella Maris Mediterraneo in Puglia and now a “free medical professional”, whatever that might be. Continue reading “Tarantino & Finelli: i plagiatori di Napoli”
