At least he didn’t plagiarize it from a human.
He let the AI do that for him.
Here is the guy that got the ball rolling on the entire charade.
I have never seen a worse case of academic plagiarism in my life.
Ph. D thesis and multiple publications. All plagiarised.
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Reading this makes me think he’s just the tip of the iceberg at Cambridge.
While this particular guy sounds like a compulsive liar, I think that with the tools currently available, it would be a good idea to do a general review of the faculty’s published work.
Because if there was nothing considered iffy with those papers, one would like to see what the rest of them are doing.
Plagiarism will be the easiest to find, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find some other interesting stuff in there.
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Some may wonder why he resigned, given he had tenure, etc.
It may be related to the various legal threats Arday sent out over the many people who tried uncovering his plagiarism (and other academic misdeeds) over the years. It wasn’t just Cofnas.
In September 2025, Times Higher Education had a bombshell story in the works: A star sociology professor at the University of Cambridge had allegedly plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. thesis and several journal articles. In one of the articles, the borrowed text appeared in quotes from subjects the professor, Jason Arday, claimed to have interviewed himself.
But after Arday enlisted Carter-Ruck, one of the United Kingdom’s leading defamation law firms, to send Times Higher Education a letter, the publication spiked the story, according to three sources who spoke to Retraction Watch.
…
The unpublished article in Times Higher Education was bylined by Jack Grove, who has written extensively about the challenges faced by minorities in U.K. institutions, according to Harris, Hammersley and Sanders.
…
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/06/police-in-cambridge-professor-row-accused-of-press/
Police in Cambridge professor row accused of press censorship
Met admits it was wrong to ask reporter to stop questioning Prof Jason Arday about his academic record
I wasn’t inclined to explain to the Scotland Yard officer the minutiae of research ethics or plagiarism conventions in UK academia, but I explained that I was a journalist looking into a story with a public interest dimension, and asked him whether he realised that he was calling a journalist.
He told me that Arday had said I’d been making online posts against him. But I hadn’t made any online posts about Arday, so what was the complaint?
He didn’t really respond, simply repeating his request that I should not contact Arday again.
Yeah, there might have been some legal fallout over having the Metropolitan Police investigating a journalist for months over his reporting (that wasn’t even published).
And Lord Young of Acton of the Free Speech Union has sent a letter to the Met asking them what the hell they were up to:
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On the …uh… lighter side:
So I went to the PubPeer page:
and there are all sorts of issues with this paper.
I will just leave this one.
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Yep. There is a big rebellion brewing there now.
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It would be interesting but I’m not sure how useful it is. Back when I was working at a university, one of the profs often commented about what you see when you run some of your own research papers through plagiarism detection software. Apparently a lot of people plagiarise themselves a bunch.
I see why it happens. A lot of people work on a relatively narrow topic and do a bunch of iterative work on some topic. There are only so many ways for you to say that you collected fish using this method, collected genetic samples and then analyzed the data using a particular set of protocols. And then in a lot of cases, you make the same spiel because you’re doing new work that serves some sort of new useful purpose, but you’re not really generating a new paradigm or doing something new so much as providing further data across a broader range and the results and the message remain the same.
I think in these cases, its more a problem with the system than the scientists where there’s so much pressure to publish in top tier journals all the time. You have to sell your work as revolutionary when it would be sufficient to dtick it in a technical report or perhaps a regional or local journal. The analyses are legit and the work is reasonable enough. Its just repetitive.
I’m not sure how many people are just blatantly making up data. I’m not sure that running this type of work through plagiarism software would do much as they’re creating new data and making up exciting new findings. So, not a lot of need to plagiarise.
The trick is to be able to separate the people out who are plagiarising others to elevate a lackluster career from the people who plagiarise themselves because they’re doing the same type of work over and over again.
In my own case, doing science for government, we have to prepare a summary of our stock assessment each year. In most years, the report is basically updating what we did last year, with one additional year. The method are the same, the analyses are the same, the results are generally same. The biggest difference is often n = n + 1. That report would fail a plagiarism test easily as we basically just update anything that was different from last year. For the most part, not a lot is different, aside from the figures that are now up to 2025, rather than 2024. That, plus my model shat the bed and here’s how we worked around it for next year.
Is plagiarism talked about much in the natural sciences? I always thought fabricating data in the natural sciences was like plagiarizing in the humanities.
Fabricating data definitely gets discussed and there’ve been people fired for doing that. There was a behavioural ecologist doing work at spiders that comes to mind and someone doing fish related work.
Plagiarism also gets discussed. I know with the proliferation of journals some people have been blatantly copying nearly entire articles.
I think something that’s borderline unethical is what some people call salami science. The authors basically try and find the smallest publishable unit in order to maximise the number of publications they can get out of a project. So instead of writing 1 comprehensive paper, you write 4 or 5 small papers describing small parts of your project. Then you write another paper that integrates the 4 or 5 smaller studies to come up with some sort of grand overall finding.
On the other hand, when I was in Australia, the group I was working with was trying to turn every paper into a Science or Nature paper because they were trying to raise the prestige of the institute. We wasted a lot of time trying to oversell our results in order to get into a top tier journal. I think we would have been better off getting more articles into mid-tier journals and going for the higher tier journals when we had something interesting to say. Unfortunately, the Australian university funding system pushes departments to that approach. Or at least did that at the time.
How did that get past the peer reviewers, the editor and the copy editor?
On the other hand, my 2 papers in chemistry type journals had kind of pathetic reviews. So perhaps not totally surprised.
Or like creating a really expensive bubble.
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Yes, I call that “repurposing”.
You may not have used plagiarism software (given what you wrote, it’s a sure thing.)
I have used TurnItIn, because I taught a writing class at UConn – 2014-2017. So that was a while ago, and the software behavior has probably changed a bit since then, but the main issue is that it doesn’t merely say “This is copied text” – it tells you where the text was copied from.
It also flags “similarity” to other papers that were already submitted to the system, even ones submitted by the same student.
The class I taught had a bunch of papers where the “plagiarism” was irrelevant. I had them writing resumes and LinkedIn profiles, as well as short emails about particular topics I gave them.
One set of papers were early drafts of the final paper. Of course there were copies of what was submitted before. THAT’S WHAT I EXPECTED.
As a writing teacher for UConn, I was required to use TurnItIn, but I never used it to mark somebody down, because the goal of the class was to improve actuarial written communication. Originality wasn’t the point. Precision, accuracy, and effectiveness was the point. I went over a lot of professionalism topics in the class.
If I were teaching the class now, I would cover something like attempting to use AI to create an executive summary… and seeing where that goes wrong (or right).
I would definitely be talking up the abuse of AI in creating business reports, and the danger. The computer can never take the blame – it’s on the human who decided to deploy it.
-–But back to academia – there are some absolute frauds in the academy, and it’s in the hard sciences as well as the “soft” sciences. This is why I read the Retraction Watch blog.
It is obvious that many “peer reviewers” don’t review a damn thing, and the journal editors aren’t editing.
Many institutions have been drifting along on past reputations - perhaps some have maintained quality, but many are nothing but fulfilling the need to publish to maintain status. This is not new; when I was in my microniche in grad school decades ago, and went to one of the microniche symposia for that area, I realized people weren’t reading each other’s papers. It was pretty depressing.
There’s a zero-sum game for positions & grants, so there are perverse incentives within the academy towards cutting corners.
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Yeah, I haven’t used the plagiarism software. Kind of wish I’d had it for the one course I led the lab for. I’m not sure how much plagiarism it would find in my work where I’ve made such massive leaps between topics. There hasn’t been a lot of overlap in the topics. The annual reports I’m doing now, they’d definitely get flagged.
I had one student who didn’t show up for the lab and thus had no data or knowledge about the lab group project. She still turned in an assignment as it was 100% of the lab mark. Every single line was plagiarised and irrelevant to the assignment. She blamed it on having a cold. For 3 or 4 months?
My favourite student plagiarism story is the woman in my housemate’s course who miraculously found a completed assignment in the toilet stall with no name on it, so she foolishly put her name on it and submitted it.
I have a friend who taught a lab course with a big annual project, but they switch up systems from year to year. One year it was based on trout(?) in a river. The next year it was about birds in a field or something. A student in the friend’s class got busted for handing in the trout report in a bird year.
I’m still kind of doubtful about how much serioud plagiarism is going to be found. I’m not too bothered by the cases where a person cites someone and screws up the quotation marks of the quote from the same source or doesn’t paraphrase enough.
The bigger problem I’m dealing with is some of the incredibly shitty research paper some workers on my current topic published in the 90s and 2000s. They were mid level names at the time and got to publish papers that seem to be primarily based off of hunches and their guesses as to what some numbers might be. They’ve been challenged on some of their papers by people who know some topics much better than they do and now they’re fighting bitterly to try and save their legacy. When you’re allowed to declare the numbers are this openly, with no sourcing, there’s no need to secretively fabricate data in the shadows.
The bs journals don’t help the problem. I recently saw a manuscript I’d rejected for major statistical problems was recently published in a different journal. I should really go and read it and see if its any better.
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Not plagiarism, but it reminds me of the final year exam for Queensland ancient history students. The previous few years had a big section on Augustus Caesar and the education department decided to change it to Julius Caesar. Unfortunately they didn’t let some of the schools know about the change so the students ended up studying for the wrong Caesar.
Back in the day…this was an automatic fail in the class and a black mark on your academic record (a serious matter if you wanted to do further graduate study).
That tended to keep most students honest.
How did your dept enforce this in terms of punishment?
She got a zero on the assignment.
My housemate had to deal with it more. This was back in Australia and I was working at a midtier uni that relied heavily on international students. It seemed like they were hesitant to boot students for cheating.
They kind of set them up to fail. The best students went to a group of 8 uni, my uni got the remainder. They had an English upgrading program that may have been easier to pass than an IELTS test. Then they were doing university coursework with difficult English for the students to follow. Their families were paying a fortune for them to go to school/get Australian citizenship. If they’re failing, of course they’re going to cheat.
It’s a well known story. Unfortunately, pay walls on these…
This one has access
As does this one
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Back in the mid-1980s Sydney University started a new upcoming system for my high school graduation class that said you had to include English in your overall graduation score. Each degree program had a cutoff score (varied by year depending on number of applications) that was strictly adhered to in order to be accepted. The grade was determined by the top ten out of 12 units - most subjects ranged from 2 to 4 units. The study of the subjects was a two year program so you had to choose what to study two years before graduation. I dropped my best non-STEM subject, Music to concentrate on English which lowered my score considerably.
Two months before we were due to sit for the graduation exams (held at the end of the two years), Sydney University dropped the requirement. I’m guessing they realized they would miss out on much of the lucrative foreign-student market if they enforced the requirement. I scraped into my course by one mark (out of 500). Ironically, later on I changed to a music degree.