Prof Phan Thanh Son Nam receives Ta Quang Buu Awards

On March 18, HCMUT officially spoke about the errors in international publications by Prof Phan Thanh Son Nam, Dean of the Chemical Engineering Faculty at the school.

The Chemical Engineering Scientific Council on March 15 held a meeting with university’s leaders to discuss the issues related to Nam’s articles.

At the meeting, Nam gave official explanations about the errors and received many comments from the scientific council members.

The meeting concluded that there were some repeated data (spectrum images) in some scientific articles of the research team led by Nam. The data were implemented by the research team over a long period of time.

The research team includes many members in charge of different works, from carrying out experiments to collecting and classifying data. Prof Phan Thanh Son Nam, as the head of the research team, took the responsibility of checking articles before publishing.

However, mistakes were still made during the process. These were scientific errors which needed to be amended in accordance with procedures set by the journals.

Soon after discovering the errors, the research team immediately contacted the editorial board of the journals which published the articles to report the errors and got approval for amendments.

The research team has been checking and collecting data to amend the content with errors as soon as it can. The team is also conducting an overall review of the published articles to ensure the quality and accuracy of publications. If mistakes are discovered, they will contact the editorial boards of journals to fix the mistakes in accordance with procedures set by the journals.

The research team has made reasonable changes to its procedures on creating plans and implementing and examining research content before publishing. It will use more PhDs to make more careful checks and cross-checks among sub-teams.

Meanwhile, HCMUT has requested that the science-technology and project department ask research teams and lecturers at the school to check their scientific publications and the procedures of publications to minimize possible mistakes.

Some days ago, an entry was posted on open Wikipedia which denounced Prof Phan Thanh Son Nam for cheating on scientific research results by reusing the same magnetic resonance spectra of one measurement for many different results in different unrelated articles.

Nam, in an entry on his personal page with 5,000 followers, calls the scandal his ‘bloody lesson’.

Phan Thanh Son Nam was the youngest Vietnamese professor at the time when he was granted the title of Professor in 2014. 

Le Huyen

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