Category: authorship issues

Unverifiable researchers are a harbinger of paper mill activity. While journals have clues to identifying fake personas — lack of professional affiliation, no profile on ORCID or strings of random numbers in email addresses, to name a few — there isn’t a standard template for doing so. 

The International Association of Scientific, Technical, & Medical Publishers (STM) has taken a stab at developing a framework for journals and institutions to validate researcher identity, with its Research Identity Verification Framework, released in March. The proposal suggests identifying “good” and “bad” actors based on what validated information they can provide, using passport validation when all else fails, and creating a common language in publishing circles to address authorship. 

But how this will be implemented and standardized remains to be seen. We spoke with Hylke Koers, the chief information officer for STM and one of the architects of the proposal. The questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Continue reading Can a better ID system for authors, reviewers and editors reduce fraud? STM thinks so

More than a dozen universities have used “questionable authorship practices” to inflate their publication metrics, authors of a new study say. One university even saw an increase in published articles of nearly 1,500% in the last four years. 

The study, published January 5 in Quantitative Science Studies, “intends to serve as a starting point for broader discussions on balancing the pressures of global competition with maintaining ethical standards in research productivity and authorship practice,” study authors Lokman Meho and Elie Akl, researchers at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, told Retraction Watch. 

Continue reading The 14 universities with publication metrics researchers say are too good to be true

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.

Continue reading ‘Violated’: Engineering professor found her name on four papers she didn’t write

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. 

Continue reading Highly cited scientist published dozens of papers after his death

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. 

Continue reading Gift authorship common in psychology, survey suggests

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.

Continue reading Exclusive: Researcher outs Indian university’s publishing scam after it fails to pay him

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. 

Continue reading What’s in a name? Made-up authors are penning dozens of papers