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Apparent plagiarism leads Elsevier to retract periodic table book

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2021-06-21 20:30:07

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Elsevier has retracted a whole book about the periodic table after it came to light that significant portions appear to be plagiarised from Wikipedia. Published and retracted last year, The Periodic Table: Nature’s Building Blocks: An Introduction to the Naturally Occurring Elements, Their Origins and Their Uses, addresses minerals and their elements and covers the history of the periodic table.

The senior author of the book is mineralogist Theo Kloprogge, an honorary senior fellow at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia and adjunct professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas.

The book’s downfall began on 26 December 2020 when Thomas Rauchfuss, an inorganic chemistry professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, US, and occasional editor at Wikipedia, received a message from a Finnish Wikipedia editor through the site’s inter-editor messaging service, asking for his help as a chemist.