There is an article about questions raised about his Journal articles with the same sort of concerns. Martyn Hammersley is mentioned as one of those concerned who wrote to Prof Arday - he is well regarded and has written books on Ethics in Qualitative Research. From the article (worth reading) and in the close Hammersley is quoted a regretting that the article broke in the way that it did - such that right wing media are those paying attention, But note that Hammersley is bringing up plagarism (and so did others) in 2023,
On May 19, 2023, Hammersley sent an email to Hilary Cremin, the Head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, and to Rhys Morgan, the university’s Head of Policy, Governance, and Integrity:
There is substantial plagiarism from one source, and some from another. It is also the case that a considerable portion of the article follows the structure of the paper by Memon et al: even where their words are not used exactly, these are paraphrased (though also elaborated). It even looks as if a couple of the quotations from informants may have been derived from Memon et al. Both of these articles are cited by Arday, but the quotes from them are unattributed.
In a response dated June 21, 2023, Cremin wrote that Arday had agreed “to take the article down from the journal online platform in order to address these concerns” but Arday had the department’s “full support.” Morgan, meanwhile, noted that because the alleged plagiarism occurred prior to his arrival at Cambridge, “we do not consider it within our remit to investigate the paper to which you refer.” (Morgan did not respond to our request for comment, and our email to Cremin received an out-of-office response.)
Six months later, in December 2023, Social Sciences published a correction, adding new citations to make it “clear where ideas were adapted from past research.” A second article, published in Educational Philosophy and Theory, was corrected the following year for text overlap with the Memon paper and other publications.
But the Social Sciences correction notice glossed over the most significant post-publication changes Arday actually made to the text. He removed claims that he analyzed the transcripts from interview subjects with “an iterative coding scheme using NVivo qualitative data analysis software” and had a second researcher “independently read the scripts” and code the data to “enhance the validity of emerging themes and claims.” Instead, he said, he recorded the interviews, transcribed them verbatim and identified salient themes through “review and reflection.”
In addition, Arday changed or removed quotes that had previously been attributed to his interview transcripts. Out of 31 quotes in the original manuscript, he trimmed or reworded 12 of them, and cut 6 of them entirely. Some of the original quotes appear to have been patched together from subjects in Memon’s BMJ Open paper.
Arday numbered his participants from 1 to 32, but there were actually two 13s: One of them he described as a Black female undergraduate and the other as a Black male undergraduate. The Black male undergraduate, according to Arday, viewed clinicians as being instruments of oppression:
Let’s face it … with the stroke of a pen you could be sectioned or sent away for some counseling. Or … have administered some ridiculous dose of whatever kind of medicine.
A similar quote about clinicians appears in Memon et al. attributed to Male D in focus group 1:
With the stroke of a pen to decide whether you are going to be sectioned or whether you are going to be sent away for some counselling. Or … administered some really, really high doses of whatever kind of medicine.
The Black female undergraduate in Arday’s study expressed similar distrust toward the healthcare system:
Within African and West Indian communities … people do not trust psychiatrists in particular.
This sentiment, too, appears to come from Male D in Memon et al:
In the West Indian community … people do not trust psychiatrists particularly.
In the corrected version of Arday’s paper, the quote from the female 13 has been trimmed of the overlap, while the quote from the male 13 has been cut entirely. None of this is described clearly in the correction notice.
retractionwatch.com/2026/07/27/cambridge-jason-arday-plagiarism-allegations-times-higher-education-exclusive/