Category: authorship issues

On a Friday in July, Laura Schaefer Googled herself to find her ORCID researcher ID for a paper submission. 

To her surprise, a paper popped up with her name in a journal she’d never published in. Her surprise quickly turned to concern – had someone copied one of her articles? 

As she searched the site where the work appeared, she found more articles with her name, covering subjects she had never written about and with co-authors she didn’t know. 

“[I] became angrier the more I found, and also started feeling really violated that someone had used my name and title to put forward something that wasn’t scientifically rigorous,” Schaefer, a professor of mechanical engineering at Rice University in Houston, said.

One of the most highly cited authors in engineering has continued publishing after his death more than a year ago. 

Jiří Jaromír Klemeš, a researcher at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic and a top editor at an Elsevier journal that has come under fire for author self-citation, is listed as a coauthor of at least 49 papers published since his death in January 2023. 

Most of the articles do not mention that Klemeš is deceased. Whether they should have is not entirely clear. Publishers and journals aren’t consistent about the protocol following the death of a research collaborator –  a lack of consistency that has even stirred up some debate among our own readers in the past. 

Of the 49 papers we found posthumously listing Klemeš as a coauthor, 27 fail to mention his death. Commenters on PubPeer have spotted several of these instances and queried them without a meaningful response from the surviving authors. 

New findings from a survey of psychology researchers show nearly half of the respondents have encountered unethical authorship practices in studies they have been involved in.

Researchers in Belgium surveyed more than 800 people involved in psychological research about their experiences with gift and ghost authorship, as well as the use of explicit authorship guidelines at their institutions. 

Almost half said they had witnessed gift authorship on more than one occasion – in other words, the respondents saw someone listed as an author when they had made little or no contribution to a paper. Ghost authorship –  excluding someone from a paper when they have made a significant contribution – was far less common, with fewer than one in five of the respondents reporting that they had dealt with the phenomenon. Since the authors used a convenience sample, the data show signs of authorship misconduct in psychology, but don’t tell the whole story. 

On March 12, a senior administrator at a university in India sent a business proposal to a prolific economist in Ethiopia. If he joined the school’s stable of adjunct professors, the administrator promised, easy money could be made. 

All the economist had to do was “add our affiliation for incentives in your papers,” explained Lakshmi Thangavelu, dean of international affairs at Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences (SIMATS), in Chennai, in a written exchange.

“Surely I will do that. Not a big deal,” replied Mohd Asif Shah, an associate professor at Kebri Dehar University, in eastern Ethiopia.

But the deal turned sour. Although Shah listed SIMATS as an affiliation on at least two research papers he published this fall, in December he still hadn’t received any payments from the school, he complained. Then he turned to LinkedIn to share his frustration in a post that included screenshots of his conversation with Thangavelu, who is also a professor at Saveetha Dental College, part of SIMATS.

Researchers apparently don’t need to be real to publish in scientific journals. 

Take Nicholas Zafetti of Clemson University, in South Carolina, who has at least nine publications to his name. Or Giorgos Jimenez of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with 12 papers under his belt.

Both identities seem to be bogus, according to Alexander Magazinov, a scientific sleuth and software engineer based in Kazakhstan. They add to a short but growing list of ostensibly fictitious researchers who appear as coauthors on real papers. 

An engineering journal has retracted an article that was posted on a website claiming to sell author positions. The retraction comes nearly two years after we reported on the website and a whistleblower informed the journal.

The study, “On the dynamics of an ultra-fast-rotating-induced piezoelectric cantilevered nanodisk surrounded by viscoelastic foundation,” appeared in Mechanics Based Design of Structures and Machines in December 2020. It listed researchers at Sichuan University of Science and Engineering in China as authors. The article has been cited five times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The study was retracted on March 16, 2023. The retraction notice stated:

Last week, we brought you the story of a professor who found her name on an article she didn’t write, which also seemed to have been plagiarized. 

Since our story was published, we’ve learned a little more about the journal that published the article, the African Journal of Political Science. 

Jephias Mapuva, a professor at the Bindura University of Science Education in Zimbabwe, who is listed as the editor in chief of the journal, told us in an email that he is “not associated with the journal in any way.” 

“It came to me as a surprise that I am listed as an Editor-In-Chief,” he wrote. He also copied an email address for the journal publisher, International Scholars Journal, and asked for his name to be removed from the website: 

More than a year after we reported on two websites advertising authorships of scientific papers for sale, one of the posted articles has been retracted, while publishers say they are still investigating others.

The retracted article, “Dynamic simulation of moderately thick annular system coupled with shape memory alloy and multi-phase nanocomposite face sheets,” appeared in the journal Engineering with Computers, a Springer Nature title, in January 2021. The article has been cited 28 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Although the retraction notice doesn’t say as much, the journal’s publisher told us that it removed the article in part due its having been advertised for sale.

After our September 2021 article on the websites selling authorships, the anonymous whistleblower “Artemisia Stricta” identified several papers from a cached version of one of the websites, Teziran.org, and notified the editors and publishers of the journals about the finding.

Waves have a higher energy thickness contrasted with other sustainable power sources, so it requires less space to create a similar measure of energy. The upside of these waves is that they convey measures of dynamic energy and keep them all through the excursion from the focal point of the ocean to the ocean side. The dynamic energy of the ocean waves is tackled to mechanical works like power age …

Few scholars of the work of William Faulkner know that the winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature toyed with the above passage in early drafts of his 1936 novel, Absalom, Absalom!  

He went instead with the more memorable: