The other day when I was browsing the net I came across a site http://web.me.com/hw_spiesz/hans_gottinger/Professional_Profile.html, describing Professor Hans-Werner Gottinger as an eminent economist and a mathematician, who had graduated from University of Goettigen and Munich, Germany. It also claims that Professor Gottinger has written about 50-55 articles and 15 books in economics and mathematics and had held the post of Research Lecturer in University of California and Berkley and is continuing to hold senior positions for the past 20-30 years. As per the website the latest book published by Gottinger is "STRATEGIC ECONOMICS OF NETWORK INDUSTRIES". In his book he has claimed that he is the Director, STRATEC Institute in the Technical University of Munich, Germany. However, when I was asked to do a case study on plagiarism, search in google.com opened up a new totally startling front in the form of an investigation report (1) by Professor Ben R .Martin (Professor in Science and Technology Policy Studies, The Freeman Center, University of Sussex, UK (2)). In his report (1) as the editor of Research Policy, Professor Martin through a series of analysis has brought before us that Gottinger was an imposter and a plagiarist even as early as 1978. I felt alarmed to know that Gottinger was caught 13 times plagiarizing other researchers' material. Professor Martin reports (1) that the first time Gottinger got a warning for plagiarizing was as early as 1978 (for copying from a paper by Ho and Chu of 1974). It has come to light that he has not only copied once but thrice from separate journals (papers of year 1974, 1975 and 1976) of Ho and Chu. Professor Martin (1) says that the Kyklos (the International Reviewer of Social Sciences) removed a paper of Gottinger in 1996 because he plagiarized a 1992 article of Professor Wyatt. This did not detract Gottinger. He again published a new article in the year 2002 in The International Journal of Global Energy which was again heavily plagiarized from the article by Professor Chen in the year 1997. A PhD student in June, 2007 reported to Research Policy (1) that the paper published by Gottinger in the year 1993 was more or less similar to the one published by Professor Bass in the Journal Of Business in 1980. Nature (www.nature.com) (an international weekly journal of science) in its online edition dated 9th April 2008 has reported (3) a startling fact that the claim of Gottinger as Director, STRATEC Institute in the Technical University of Munich, Germany, is totally false as the University have stated to Nature (3) that they don't host such an institute nor Gottinger is their employee. Professor Martin reports (1) that in some of his research papers, Gottinger has posed himself to be the Director of International Institute of Technology Management and Economics (IITME) but inquiry revealed that no such institute is available and the address of the institution given by Gottinger turned out to be the address of his own home. Also, the German editors of Nature told Martin that affiliations given in Gottinger's publications were also bogus (as visiting Professors of Economics, University of Oxford etc). I think from this mind boggling report, we have learnt our lesson that plagiarizing other persons work will lead us to doom as the plagiarism would come to light sometimes or the other. So dear friends, why not start our own thought processes. Let's churn our brain, let's think, create and give our best output in all fields without copying from others. 1.http://www.cas.uio.no/Publications/Seminar/Confluence_Martin.pdf - Accessed on 8-01-2011 2.http://www.inovasyon.org/pdf/Ben_R_Martin.pdf - Accessed on 8-01-2011 3.http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080409/full/452672c.html - Accessed on 8-01-2011