Parra and the Journal of Scientific Exploration

Michael Nahm’s report in this issue of the JSE deftly presents many of the scholarly offenses perpetrated by Alejandro Parra. Some of those not mentioned had to do with Parra’s submissions to the JSE, and I feel it’s important to add those to the record. JSE published a retraction notice earlier this year (Volume 35, Issue 1) and provided examples of Parra’s plagiarism. Moreover, the Journal rejected another paper in which we found substantial plagiarism. But Parra’s boldest effort was his submission, under his own name, of a paper by an Argentinian author, Anna Conforte—in fact, a paper Parra published in his own newsletter. But Parra never indicated that the paper was written by someone else. Several people independently and carefully compared the English submission to the original Spanish. All agreed that Parra apparently simply auto-translated the paper to clumsy English and presented it as his own work.