Even after close to 10 years of writing about retractions every day, some days we read retraction notices that make us say, “huh?”
Today is one of those days.
Take this retraction notice for “High-resolution ultrasound images in gouty arthritis to evaluate relationship between tophi and bone erosion,” a paper first published in Future Generation Computer Systems last year:
This article has been retracted by request of the authors.
The authors of this article have informed the journal and the Editors, that none of the authors listed had any involvement with or knowledge of the article. Using someone else’s name as an author represents a clear violation of the fundamentals of peer review, our publishing policies, and publishing ethics standards. Apologies are offered to readers of the article.
The question, of course, is why anyone would publish a paper and give credit to someone else. Perhaps they had planted some fakery in the work, a scientific publishing version of framing. But we just can’t tell.
Peter Sloot, the editor of the journal, forwarded our request for comment — that is, a polite version of “um, what the heck happened here?” — to Elsevier, the publisher. That request eventually made it to a spokesperson, who responded:
This retraction was submitted after Dr Qiu, one of the purported authors of the article in question, contacted us to declare that none of the listed authors had any notion of the submission and subsequent publication of the paper. Dr Qui stated that the email address associated with the corresponding author is fake and confirmed that it does not belong to her. We received a signed statement from the authors which declared that they had not written the article and that their identities had been stolen.
It appears that Elsevier is as perplexed as we are:
Despite best efforts, we have been unable to confirm the real identity of the corresponding or other authors and the motivation behind falsifying the authors’ identities. Given the untraceable email addresses and taking the listed authors’ declaration that their names were used as the authors of the article without permission in good faith, we proceeded with the retraction of the paper.
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“Dr Qui stated that the email address associated with the corresponding author is fake and confirmed that it does not belong to her.”
I figure that I can safely cite the e-address in question ([email protected]), since it is bogus. It features on a large number of other papers (156 Ghits). Were these all published without Dr Qui’s knowledge?
The e-mail address of a ghost writer, I presume? It looks like it is used on a lot of papers on unrelated topics.
But they are all papers nominally by Dr Qiu. The reason for the range of topics is that she heads the Department of Ultrasound of West China University (within Sichuan University), and she seems to co-author any paper involving ultrasound or radiography… even graphene biocomposites.
It would be good to know if any of her 89 papers involve a *different* e-mail address, and how many of the ones using the present, supposely bogus e-address are on her CV.
Strange, indeed!
The retraction notice seems to indicate that the paper had been published in 2018 (98 (2018) 131–134]), but volume 98 is from 2019. Here is the URL to the retracted paper:
https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0167739X1831851X?token=BA850FDBAA08B79A58FD37868D32226774C2FA9A1D1B04FED4D5BACBB7A6362BB6850474081056C8109736AF6518FAA7
Sounds a lot like my brother’s explanation that the joint my parents found in his pack belonged to a friend.
At least this statement in the article was true:
“These authors contributed equally to this work.”
This is pretty interesting, the most recent publication that Dr. Qiu is a corresponding author:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337898363_Patient-based_cost-effectiveness_analysis_of_FOLFIRI_versus_FOLFOX7_for_advanced_gastric_adenocarcinoma_in_China_A_4-year_prospective_randomised_phase_II_study
Her email address is **qiu*@163.com, seems odd.
That’s a different Dr Qiu, I believe. An oncologist rather than a radiologist.
When I started reading this, I thought that it might be connected to some “miracle” or perhaps a patent . For the claims: “See, it is published in respected journal, so it must be true”. But it doesn’t seems so.
I work with a lot of clients (for English editing) that use the private email @163.com. It is a real pain, because folks in China have a bad habit of having weird email handles (not just their name) and/or they use a random string of numbers, and their email signature tags are usually some inspirational quote or joke (in Chinese characters) that they also change frequently (so searching for an old email is impossible).
They use this client because their university emails often go down or get full.
The best way to handle this is to require that each author include a university or institution or company email address (they can also include the commercial ones that work more stably).
And the journals could set up an auto-email to go to each listed author that the author must answer some questions (personal data like email or other publication) or even show that they are not a robot (pick out all the crosswalks!).
I am not sure why this happened, or how often it happens. I cannot see how someone could be generating money doing this, unless some journals pay for this from writers.
More likely, a junior co-author skipped the chain of command to publish this. I also work with authors where the head PI is so far removed from them (ie like a Dept chair of huge depts) and the MS students are unknown to them.
I was startled to see that “@163.com” email addresses are involved here – I have blocked all email from the 163.com domain for a couple decades now because every message I received from that domain was spam. Are there actually legitimate email users at 163.com?