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November 7, 2005, Monday, BC cycle

British psychiatrist accused of plagiarizing from Md. professor

SECTION: State and Regional

LENGTH: 349 words

DATELINE: LONDON

The employers of leading British psychiatrist Raj Persaud said Monday they were reviewing claims that he plagiarized portions of an article written by an American academic for a piece of his own.
The British journal “Progress in Neurology and Psychiatry,” which published Persaud’s article in February, retracted it in its September issue, saying that “a very substantial percentage of the wording of the commentary consists of material reproduced without permission or acknowledgment” from work by Thomas Blass, a professor of psychology at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Persaud’s article, “Why the Media Refuses to Obey,” discussed a 1963 experiment by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in which subjects were told to press a button they believed would electrocute their peers.
Several paragraphs were virtually identical to “The Man Who Shocked the World,” an article Blass published in the American journal “Psychology Today” in March 2002.
Blass told The Associated Press on Monday that he was “outraged” to read Persaud’s piece.
“It turned out that about 50 percent of the wording … was a copy of what appeared in three of my writings,” Blass said. Other wording came from Blass’ Web site about Milgram and his biography of the psychologist.
But Blass said he was satisfied the situation had been resolved. “All I wanted was to correct the situation and redress the wrong, and that’s been done,” he said.
Persaud, a consultant psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley hospital and director of the Center for Public Engagement in Mental Health Sciences at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, London, was not available for comment Monday.
In a written statement, he apologized for “the error which occurred, whereby when I cut and pasted the original copy, the references at the end were inadvertently omitted.”
In a joint statement Monday, the South London and Maudsley hospital and the Center for Public Engagement in Mental Health said they were conducting a review into the circumstances surrounding the article’s publication.