In its first issue of 2004, Nature said that Park Yung, who received his doctorate from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Kaist) and who worked as a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge, committed forgery in at least eight academic papers from 1997 to 2001.

Nature revealed the plagiarism in its editorial, titled "Complacency about misconduct," and in an article, titled "Plagiarism in Cambridge physics lab prompts calls for guidelines."

Nature found that the main resource papers Park used wer written in Russian.

For example, Park's academic paper published in Europhysics Letters in December 2000 was a modified version of a paper printed in 1994 by Russia's prestigious physic magazine, JETP Letters, Nature said.

Park in the meantime had been hired as a professor in Korea. The Russian scientist, who found out later that his paper had been plagiarized, notified the University of Cambridge in April 2003. Investigators at Kaist, which was separately informed of the fact, found additional plagiarism in its investigation. In June 2003, the school reported the result of its investigation to the editors of the respective academic magazines.

Although Park resigned, Nature said, "Universities and journals do not always respond appropriately." Due to the incident, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) is reportedly devising a draft of guidelines to tackle plagiarism.

In addition, three Korean professors were found to have committed plagiarism by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Communications Magazine in 2001. An official at Kaist said that it is an act very disgraceful in terms of scholarly conscience. He also pointed out that the current system that judges scholars only by the number of publications should be changed. (Paik Seung-jae, whitesj@chosun.com )