Retired Dutch anthropologist Mart Bax made a career out of making up papers, many of them on the Bosnian genocide.
He retired from the Free University in Amsterdam in 2002. It wasn’t until 2013 that the university published a report indicating that Bax never published 61 of the papers he listed on his CV, and many of the real articles were based on fabricated data.
Publisher Taylor and Francis retracted one of Bax’s papers from Ethnic and Racial Studies in April. Now they’re retracting a second, from Ethnos, using almost identical language.
Here’s the notice:
The following article is being retracted from publication in Ethnos:
“Planned Policy or Primitive Balkanism? A Local Contribution to the Ethnography of the War in Bosnia-Herzegonina” by Mart Bax, Volume 65, Issue 3, 2000, pp. 317-340, DOI: 10.1080/00141840050198018
as a result of an investigation conducted by the Free University of Amsterdam which determined research conducted by and used by Mart Bax as a basis for published work to be the result of scientific misconduct.
The Editors and publishers of the journal, Taylor and Francis, note we received, peer-reviewed, accepted, and published the article in good faith based on warranties made by the author regarding the originality and provenance.
The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as ‘retracted.’
For further details, the Free University of Amsterdam’s Report is available online here: http://www.vu.nl/nl/Images/20130910_RapportBax_tcm9-356928.pdf1 (Dutch) or [here] (English).
The paper has been cited 17 times, according to Google Scholar.
Hat tip: Rolf Degen
It would seem a paper is needed to document the retractions and fictions alone.
The English language Wikipedia site on Mart Bax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mart_Bax gives a concise summary of his ‘scientific misconduct’. One impression from the different sources is that Mart Bax considered himself as one of an elite, who ignore details of eg proper publishing and who is convinced of their own work. A more common phenomenon?