Bayesian networks plagiarism

If, as they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then we are privileged to have discovered (thanks to a tip off by Philip Leicester) that our work on Bayesian network idioms - first published in Neil M, Fenton NE, Nielsen L, ''Building large-scale Bayesian Networks'', The Knowledge Engineering Review, 15(3), 257-284, 2000 (and covered extensively in Chapter 7 of our book) has been re-published - almost verbatim -  in the following publication:

Milan Tuba and Dusan Bulatovic, "Design of an Intruder Detection System Based on Bayesian Networks", WSEAS Transactions on Computers, 5(9), pp 799-809, May 2009. ISSN: 1109-2750

The whole of Section 3 ("Some design aspects of large Bayesian networks") - which constitutes 6 out of the 10 pages - is lifted from our 2000 paper.  Our work was partly inspired by the work of Laskey and Mahoney. The authors reference that work but, of course, not ours, hence confirming the very deliberate plagiarism.

Milan Tuba and Dusan Bulatovic are at the Megatrend University of Belgrade (which we understand is a small private University) and we had not come across them before now. The journal WSEAS Transactions on Computers seems to be an example of one of the dubious journals exposed in this week's New York Times article. Curiously enough, after a colleague distributed that article yesterday I was going to write back to him saying that I disagreed with the rather elitist tone of the article, which suggests that the peer review process of the 'reputable scientific journals' was somehow unimpeachable - in reality there is no consensus on what journals are 'reputable' and even the refereeing of those widely considered to be the best is increasingly erratic and at times bordering on corrupt (which is inevitable when it relies exclusively on volunteer academics).  But at least I would hope that any 'reputable' journal would still be alert to the kind of plagiarism we now see here.

This is not the first time our work has been very blatantly plagiarised. Interestingly, on a previous occasion it was in a book that was published by Wiley Finance (who I am sure are widely considered one of the most reputable publishers). The book was 'written' by a guy who had been our PhD student for a short time at City University before he vanished without notice or explanation. The book contained large chunks of our work (none of which the 'author' had contributed to, as it predated his time as a PhD student with us) without any attribution. Despite informing Wiley of this, and proving to them that a) the author's qualifications as stated in the book were bogus; and b) the endorsements on the back cover were fraudulent, they did nothing about it.

Launch Event

The book was officially launched in the UK on 13 December with a reception at Queen Mary University of London. Here are some photos from the event (with thanks to Laura Landon for the the good quality ones). As you can see the books finally arrived  just in time.

Norman Fenton, Rob Calver (CRC) and Martin Neil  (photo courtesy of Laura Landon)

Photo courtesy of Laura Landon

Rob Calver (Photo courtesy of Laura Landon)

Norman, Naomi and Martin (Photo courtesy of Laura Landon)

Continued delay in distribution of the book in Europe

Although the book was published on 7 November in the USA the copies for distribution in Europe have STILL not arrived. The entire first print run has been sold out but we are told the second print run should be available in the USA at the end of this week and some of those will be shipped to the UK.

We have a private launch party on Thursday and still have not had our own copies of the book, but the publishers are running off a special 20 print-on-demand copies for the event.

Despite the difficulty of actually getting the book it continues to get great reviews on Amazon (see, e.g. here and here) while Angela Saini has posted a nice article about it today. And it is the featured book at the Theorem of the Day website.

Book status and reviews

Although the book was sent to the typesetters a few weeks ago, now the publishers are saying that the printed copies will not be arriving until mid to late November.

Several reviewers have, however, been sent the final pdf version and we have been getting some fantastic reviews back as can be seen on the publishers' book page here (click on the tab "Reviews").