Milen Zamfirov
Earlier this year, Milen Zamfirov, dean of the faculty of educational sciences at Sofia University in Bulgaria, was named an exceptional scientist in the social sciences and humanities. As part of the accolades at the prestigious Pythagoras Science Awards from the Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science, Zamfirov received a commemorative plaque, diploma, and a cash prize of 8,000 BGN (US $4,300).
Now, he is accused of plagiarising past research in a paper he co-authored with Margarita Bakracheva, who received a certificate of excellence from the Union of the Bulgarian Scientists earlier this year.
Their study, titled, “In Search of Integrativity of Sciences: the Principle of Supplementarity in the Story of Pauli and Jung,” was published in Bulgarian in 2021.
But the paper seems to have significant overlap with other sources, according to Irene Glendinning, a researcher and consultant based in Leicester, UK.
“I don’t think there is any doubt that this is plagiarism,” said Glendinning, who has studied plagiarism policies at higher education policies across the European Union. “In this case, together with the ridiculous mistakes in the narrative, I guess they knew it was wrong, but thought it was worth the risk because their paper was in Bulgarian and they thought it unlikely anyone would notice or care.”
Two previous English-language papers that the 2021 paper has overlap with are a 2015 Frontiers in Psychology study and a paper published by the Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2012.
Zamfirov did not reply to a request for comment. Bakracheva told Retraction Watch in an email that her study was a theoretical review of the “very few studies highlighting Jung-Pauli collaboration and common approach in different sciences, in this case physics and psychology.”
As for the text overlap and similarities between figures, Bakracheva said past literature is “correctly referenced” at the end of each paragraph. “Since it is explicitly stated that the aim of the article is to give a brief example of a possible historical illustration of the cooperation and integration of different scientific fields, there is no demarcation between the referenced sources and the ‘personal thoughts’.”
However, Jerome Buseymeyer, a psychologist and brain sciences researcher at Indiana University Bloomington who co-authored the paper in Frontiers in Psychology study, was not convinced. “I think the work should be retracted or rejected,” he said. “There are proper ways to refer and make use of others’ work by properly acknowledging and getting permissions.”
As a “minor defence,” Glendinning said some academics “think it is OK to paraphrase or directly copy material as long as a reference to the original is given somewhere in the paper. No real excuse in this case, but I’ve come across this quite a lot in different counties.”
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