A professor at Sri Venkateswara University, in Tirupati, India, has been found to have plagiarized or falsified more than 70 research papers, according to an article in the magazine Chemical & Engineering News.

The papers appeared from 2004 to 2007 in Western science journals. Four journals published by Elsevier have already retracted 13 articles, and another journal published by Springer Netherlands has retracted three more.

An unnamed source told the magazine that the wrongdoer, Pattium Chiranjeevi, had retained his faculty position at the university but had been prohibited from doing or supervising research.

The same source said that Mr. Chiranjeevi’s papers contained “illogical” chemistry, and claimed to use instruments not available at the university. “How did this get past reviewers?” the person asked.

The whistle-blower for the case was Purnendu K. Dasgupta, a chemistry professor at the University of Texas at Arlington who edits a journal that Mr. Chiranjeevi submitted a manuscript to. Mr. Dasgupta said a reviewer noticed a similarity between the manuscript and an earlier paper from a Japanese research group. On inspection, Mr. Dasgupta found that the two papers were identical except for a change in the name of the chemical being measured, from a chromium compound to an arsenic compound. —Lila Guterman