Evidence suggests much of Ranga Dias’s thesis was copied from other sources

In March, University of Rochester (U of R) physicist Ranga Dias made a blockbuster announcement: His team had detected superconductivity at room temperature, in a material that did not need to be squeezed to incredibly high pressures. Many physicists regarded the claim warily because 6 months earlier, Nature had retracted a separate room-temperature superconductivity claim from Dias’s group, amid allegations of data manipulation.

Now come accusations that Dias plagiarized much of his Ph.D. thesis, completed in 2013 at Washington State University (WSU). Undark, The New York Times, and Physics Magazine previously reported that his thesis contains many passages identical to those from a 2007 thesis written by James Hamlin at Washington University in St. Louis. But Hamlin, now a high-pressure experimentalist at the University of Florida, and Simon Kimber, a physicist most recently at the University Burgundy Franche-Comté, have gone through the thesis by hand and say they have discovered more widespread examples of copying. In an analysis shared with Science, they find Dias’s thesis contains at least 6300 words—some 21% of the thesis—that are identical to passages from 17 other sources. Dias’s website at U of R also contains text that appears to have been copied without attribution from other sources, Hamlin and Kimber say.

Experts who examined the analysis agree the thesis is heavily plagiarized. “It’s obvious,” says Lisa Rasmussen, a research ethicist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. A U of R spokesperson noted that the plagiarism concerns are largely confined to the methodology and background section. But that doesn’t absolve Dias, says Vanja Pupovac, an expert in research integrity at the University of Rijeka, in Croatia. “[It] demonstrates, at best, the [Ph.D.] candidate's gross negligence and, at worst, their lack of understanding of the topic,” she said in an email...

...One of the 17 sources Hamlin and Kimber identified is a 1999 paper by Dias’ thesis adviser, WSU materials scientist Choong-Shik Yoo. Yoo says he had spotted the apparent duplications himself while reviewing the thesis. “I thought that that was just a simple mistake, so I didn’t think of that as a big deal,” says Yoo, who adds that his paper is referenced elsewhere in the thesis. The university’s academic honesty policy, however, “makes no distinction between intentional and unintentional plagiarism.” According to Yoo, Dias submitted a request to correct his thesis on 30 March and it is now under review with the university’s Academic Integrity Hearing Board...

...The apparent plagiarism did not stop with the 2013 thesis. Hamlin and Kimber also found that descriptions of research on Dias’s websites, for both U of R and Harvard University, where he completed a postdoc, contain several passages identical to at least three other sources. One page on the site, about research in 2D materials, has sentences that match a description on the website of University of Washington researcher Matthew Yankowitz. “I am essentially certain that the text … was plagiarized from my own,” Yankowitz said in an email.

In the meantime, several research groups have failed to replicate Dias’s latest superconductivity claim. Faith in the result may be diminishing, but interest in room-temperature superconductivity remains hot. As Dias’s Harvard website puts it,“[e]fforts to identify and develop new superconducting materials continue to increase rapidly, motivated by both fundamental science and the prospects for applications.”

A 2010 Nature paper by a group in Japan started with almost identical words...