A FACULTY member who also serves as an academic editor at publishing company Wiley is under fire for allegedly publishing three of his journal articles in multiple online libraries, in violation of journal policies and standards.
Daniel Berdida, coordinator for national or local relations and programs at the College of Nursing, allegedly published similar manuscripts under different titles.
Retraction Watch, a blog that monitors retractions of scientific papers and other scholarly literature, initially reported on the incident on April 10.
The duplicate papers were published in journals of reputable publications, including the Wiley Online Library.
A nursing faculty member told the Varsitarian that Berdida has been on leave since the start of the second term of the academic year.
The article titled “Nurses’ professional values and competency in Saudi Arabia: A structural equation modelling approach,” published in 2022 on the Wiley Online Library, was identified as a duplicate of “Structural equation modelling of ethicomoral values and competence of nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic,” originally published in the Elsevier journal Collegian in 2023 (initially submitted in March 2022).
Similarly, “Safety climate, quality of care, adherence to and compliance with standard precautions among nurses: Structural equation modeling,” published in the Wiley Online Library’s International Nursing Review, has been retracted.
It was found to be similar to “Nurses’ safety climate, quality of care, and standard precautions adherence and compliance: A cross-sectional study,” which was published in Sigma’s Journal of Nursing Scholarship.
As stated in the retraction notice of the duplicated article, Berdida accepted “full responsibility” and apologized for the “duplicate submission and publication.”
“The retraction has been agreed upon following an investigation into concerns raised by a third party, which revealed a major overlap with a previously published article by the same group of authors,” the statement read.
Berdida’s co-authors in the article, Rizal Grande and Mohammed Alshammari, were said to be “not aware of this inappropriate publishing behavior.”
The Varsitarian reached out to Berdida to get his side, but he has yet to respond as of writing.
College of Nursing Dean Rowena Chua also declined to comment on the issue as the “investigation is still ongoing.”
Also scheduled for retraction is the Elsevier-published article titled “The mediating roles of moral courage and moral resilience between nurses’ moral distress and moral injury: An online cross-sectional study.”
It was discovered to be a duplicate of “Moral Distress, Moral Resilience, Moral Courage, and Moral Injury Among Nurses in the Philippines During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Mediation Analysis,” published in the Journal of Religion and Health under Springer Link.
According to Retraction Watch, Berdida informed Roger Watson, editor in chief of the Elsevier journal Nurse Education in Practice, that he had been on “health leave” and attributed the duplicates to a “breakdown in communication” with his research assistant.
“I fully acknowledge my responsibility in this matter,” Berdida was quoted as saying in a March 13 email to Watson.
“If it is within your discretion, I would appreciate it if you could consider retracting the manuscript from your journal, given the circumstances,” he said in the email.
Submitting the same research article to multiple journals, known as duplicate and redundant publications, is generally prohibited by the policies of most online library journals.
