Readers, meet Beatriz Ychussie. Or don’t meet Beatriz Ychussie.
Ychussie is a co-author of three recently retracted math papers. Or maybe not.
The three articles — in the Journal of Inequalities and Applications, Advances in Difference Equations, and Fixed Point Theory and Applications, all Springer Nature titles — had an overlapping set of problems, including plagiarism and faked peer review. But they all had one particular problem when it came to Ychussie:
Additionally, the identity of the corresponding author could not be verified: Roskilde University have confirmed that Beatriz Ychussie has not been affiliated with their institution.
For example, here’s the notice for “Sharp geometrical properties of a-rarefied sets via fixed point index for the Schrödinger operator equations,” published in Fixed Point Theory and Applications in 2015:
The Editors-in-Chief have retracted this article [1] because it overlaps significantly with a number of previously published articles from different authors [2–4] and one article by different authors that was simultaneously under consideration with another journal [5]. The article also showed evidence of peer review manipulation. Additionally, the identity of the corresponding author could not be verified: Roskilde University have confirmed that Beatriz Ychussie has not been affiliated with their institution. The authors have not responded to any correspondence with regards to this retraction.
Ychussie, who did not respond to a request for comment from Retraction Watch either, has three different co-authors on the papers, all from institutions in China. Together, the three papers have been cited a total of 11 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
Ychussie has one other paper — also co-authored with an academic from China — that does not appear to be retracted.
Where in the world is Beatriz Ychussie? As always, we welcome our readers’ help in figuring this out.
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Editors, when receiving a paper from an author whose name they do not recognize, should double-check an author’s affiliation by looking at the institutional website to confirm that the author is indeed at that institution. This is particularly the case when the author uses an email address that does not correspond to the institution’s domain name.
Have you asked the first author where Beatriz is? Seems like the most obvious thing to do. Additionally, I wonder if this is a case of Asian discrimination where the author felt like their chances of acceptance would increase if they tacked on a European-sounding name.
The first author on “RETRACTED ARTICLE: Normal families and asymptotic behaviors for solutions of certain Laplace equations” is Zhenhai Yan. That name is also first author on “RETRACTED ARTICLE: Fixed point theorems and explicit estimates for convergence rates of continuous time Markov chains” with coauthors “Guojun Yan” and “Ikudol Miyamoto”. The retraction notice for that paper reads: “The Editors-in-Chief have retracted this article [1] because it showed evidence of peer review manipulation. In addition, the identity of the corresponding author could not be verified: Nagoya University have confirmed that Ikudol Miyamato has not been affiliated with their Graduate School of Mathematics. The authors have not responded to any correspondence regarding this retraction.” – https://fixedpointtheoryandapplications.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s13663-020-00672-2
Thus Zhenhai Yan is associated with a possibly fictitious author independent of “Beatriz Ychussie”.
BTW: An overview of “Beatriz Ychussie” in Scholia is here: https://tools.wmflabs.org/scholia/author/Q94698229
Ah, the spectral figure of Miyamoto featured here a few months ago.
http://retractionwatch.com/2020/03/05/fake-peer-review-made-up-author-take-down-a-paper/
Fraud from China, of all places? Surely there’s been some mistake. Strangely, no-one with the surname Ychussie has an ORCID profile. But there are plenty with the given name [Beatriz](https://orcid.org/orcid-search/search?searchQuery=beatriz), more than fifty of whom have no surname or affiliation. So she might be one of those. Some of them try to stand out from the crowd by going all-caps.
> Fraud from China, of all places? Surely there’s been some mistake.
I suspect the commenter is trying to insinuate something here that is neither ok to say nor is borne out by the facts. Please consider how many articles are retracted by US or European scientist, reported on this very website.
Beatriz j’accuse, definitely not a fake name… or maybe I’m seeing things.
Clarivate does not list among the tens of millions of authors stored in the data banks of the Web of Science any other person with the surname Ychussie, except Beatriz.
As well as Ychussie and Miyamoto, there is an impressive list of recently-retracted maths papers from the same small pool of journals, coming from a pool of authors based in China collaborating with more cosmopolitan authors that cannot be traced:
Tao Zhao , Alexander Yamada (2014) “Growth properties of Green-Sch potentials at infinity” doi: 10.1186/s13661-014-0245-9
Tao Zhao , Alexander Yamada (2014) “A remark on the Dirichlet problem in a half-plane” doi: 10.1186/1029-242x-2014-497
Gaixian Xue , Eve Yuzbasi (2015) “Fixed point theorems for solutions of the stationary Schrödinger equation on cones” doi: 10.1186/s13663-015-0275-8
Zhiqiang Li , Mohamed Vetro (2015) “Levin’s type boundary behaviors for functions harmonic and admitting certain lower bounds” doi: 10.1186/s13661-015-0421-6
Jianjie Wang, Jun Pu , Ahmed Zama (2016) “Solutions of the Dirichlet-Schrödinger problems with continuous data admitting arbitrary growth property in the boundary” doi: 10.1186/s13662-016-0751-4
Xiaozhen Xie , Costanza T Viouonu (2016) “Some new results on the boundary behaviors of harmonic functions with integral boundary conditions” doi: 10.1186/s13661-016-0642-3
Jiaofeng Wang , Bin Huang , Nanjundan Yamini (2016) “An augmented Riesz decomposition method for sharp estimates of certain boundary value problem” doi: 10.1186/s13661-016-0664-x
Zhaoqi Ji , Tao Liu , Hong Tian , Tanriver Ülker (2017) “New applications of the existence of solutions for equilibrium equations with Neumann type boundary condition
Journal of inequalities and applications” doi: 10.1186/s13660-017-1357-4
Fengjiao Lü , Tanriver Ülker (2017) “Existence of weak solutions for two point boundary value problems of Schrödingerean predator-prey system and their applications” doi: 10.1186/s13662-017-1213-3
Other recent retractions from the same journals were motivated by similar reasons (plagiarism, overlap, authorship manipulation, peer-review manipulation) but did not bother with a fake non-Chinese author. Then there are papers in the same journals with implausibly-named non-Chinese first or final authors which have not been retracted yet, so they don’t really come into your bailiwick.
There have been a number of subsequent retractions from Journal of Inequalities and Applications, Boundary Value Problems, Advances in Difference Equations, and Fixed Point Theory and Applications, if you feel like an update or follow-up report.