Bahauddin Zakariya University educator ‘steals’ research paper of student

An educator at Bahauddin Zakariya University Multan has allegedly stolen a research paper from his student by publishing it in a research journal.

An education journalist Arshad Yousafzai revealed the ‘strange story about stolen paper and academic dishonesty’.

He said that a student named Muhammad Amir Ehsan has submitted the MS thesis to his supervisor, Kamran Ishfaq, who is the head of the Sociology Department at Bahauddin Zakariya University Multan.

Yousafzai added, “The teacher instead of appreciating his student, stole Ehsan’s work and published a part of the thesis mentioning himself as the first author of the paper. Amazingly, the author Kamran Ishfaq put names of the co-authors as M Yasir Malik, M Mushtaq Naz, Zahid Zulfiqar and Abdul Sattar Ghaffari.”

The journalist further said that the ‘stolen’ research paper was still present on a website. He revealed that the research journal’s website was also ‘fake’. He added, “The teacher was enough incompetent who even couldn’t manage to publish the paper in a reputable journal and thus he wasted his theft.”

The academic dishonesty was caught by the journalist Arshad Yousafzai from The News who had reported the publication of around 150 fake research papers by more than 400 Pakistani scholars and academics belonging to various public and private sector universities in a clone journal named ‘International Journal of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity’ (IJDRBC) since 2019.

The term clone journal refers to a substandard journal that copies the name of a reputable journal, according to the report. Yousafzai had also exposed the deceptive tricks of the fake research journal and the faults of the Higher Education Commission (HEC).