What do aerobics and dance training have to do with geology?
If that sounds like an odd question, take a look at more than 70 articles in a special collection of the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, published by Springer Nature, with titles such as:
- BP neural network–based detection of soil and water structure in mountainous areas and the mechanism of wearing fatigue in running sports
- Research on coastal atmospheric change and Latin dance performance based on target detection network
- Image recognition of coastal environment and aerobics sports based on remote sensing images based on deep learning
The bizarre collection was first unearthed — yes, you see what we did there — by a PubPeer commenter. Then others, including Alexander Magazinov and Guillaume Cabanac, whose work finding other gibberish papers we’ve highlighted — dug in.
Here’s the abstract for the first paper on our list above, to provide a sense of what we can only describe as the word salad that makes up these papers:
BP neural network can be said to be the most complete neural network among the existing neural networks. In recent years, with the improvement of people’s living standards, people have become more concerned about sports and the improvement of physical fitness. Many people have begun to go out of the room and go outdoors, seeking the joy of physical exercise in nature. The rapid development of sports has not only mobilized people’s desire to exercise but also promoted the common development of surrounding industries. As a professional sportswear, it must not only ensure comfort and beauty but also ensure certain functions. In running sports, most people wear tight-fitting clothing. This is because people believe that tight-fitting clothing can reduce the resistance of clothing fabrics to running and improve athletic performance. However, if the clothing is too tight, not only can it not achieve the purpose of improving athletic performance, but it will also compress the blood vessels and affect the health of the human body. The purpose of this article is to study the related mechanism of running exercise to produce fatigue feeling and to provide a set of normative evaluation criteria for running exercise. In the process of development, we should pay attention to sustainable development, and the development of ecologically fragile areas is facing serious problems such as soil erosion. During the investigation, we discovered that the topography, climate, rock conditions, and other natural factors in a certain county make the ecological environment of this area more fragile than other areas. In such a fragile ecological environment, there are fewer types of organisms. The stability is also poor; coupled with the human over-exploitation of resources and other impacts, the soil erosion in the area is serious, and natural disasters occur frequently.
All of the authors of the bizarre papers appear to be from China.
As the papers note, the “responsible editor” for the “Topical Collection on Environment and Low Carbon Transportation” is Sheldon Williamson, a Canada Research Chair who studies energy systems.
According to Williamson, however, the phrase “responsible editor” is doing a lot of work in those acknowledgements. That’s because, he says, his email — a non-institutional one he uses for editorial work — was hacked.
“The initial submissions were fine,” he told Retraction Watch. But then the journal began publishing papers that “had nothing to do with what I was intending,” he said.
Once he realized his email had been hacked, he said, he implemented two-factor authentication and suspended the account. Now he is working with the editor of the journal and the publisher, he said, to retract the papers that were off topic.
“It’s sad, it’s unfortunate,” he told Retraction Watch.
While Williamson told us he was surprised by the episode, it makes the fifth time we’re aware of that a journal has been scammed by impersonators — a phenomenon that has earned its own category in our database of retractions — and doubtless just a handful of many other such scams that have yet to be discovered. What motivates the impersonators is unclear, although ensuring their friends and colleagues have papers accepted — and perhaps cite them — may play a role.
In the meantime, all of these papers made it through Springer Nature’s production system and were published. And his name ended up tied up in all of that.
“I was so upset,” he said. “It’s my profile and my reputation.”
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a one-time tax-deductible contribution or a monthly tax-deductible donation to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
This is fascinating. I’d say both Springer and the editor have more ‘splainin to do. “The initial submissions were fine…” Accepting his explanation of a hacked email, it still begs the question, what happened to the legitimate papers received that remain unpublished? At first I thought Springer must have had some workflow software glitch, or maybe a disgruntled production editor was giving Springer a big FU on their last week in the office. But on a closer look, these appear to be deliberate fakes where someone(s) took parts of possibly legitimate work and mashed them together into some ah, very multidisciplinary work. What motivation is there for going to the trouble of hacking a guest editor, producing a series of bizarre mashup articles, by fake authors from fake institutions? A Sokal-style prank to embarrass the Saudi Society for Geosciences, editor in chief Abdullah M. Al-Amri, Springer, or to show that there’s little distance between “predatory” publishers and the world’s largest scholarly publisher, Springer-Nature?
Sounds like a new type of paper is out there now: The ‘throw an bowl of pasta at the wall to see what will stick’ article. Awful to see that a real editor had his email hacked in an unfortunate scheme like this, which was so bizarre that it was ultimately doomed to fail. The papers, because of their unusual nature, would have always attracted attention & additional scrutiny. What a tremendous waste of time & money for everyone this scheme has created. Hopefully, the perpetrators will be identified & outed.
The 71 articles mentioned this RW post on the Arabian Journal of Geosciences are just the start of it. Their Topical Collections are home to much mischief. The collection “Environment and Low Carbon Transportation” had 305 articles when I started looking through it, 308 at last count , the vast majority of which look suspicious. Only 3 of 23 articles in the special collection “Smart agriculture and geo-informatics” (ostensibly edited by Hoshang Kolivand) appear non-suspicious. Only 1 of 18 articles in special collection “Data Science for Ocean Data Visualization and Modeling” (ostensibly edited by Syed Hassan Ahmed) has a title that relates to the topic.
It would take a long time to unwind what’s going with this journal. Some of these articles seem like really good deep fakes. Consider ” Comprehensive analysis of environmental ecological restoration effect of mining area under the planting of arbor and shrub plant landscape” (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12517-021-07279-w.) No strange dance and geology topic disconnects, sections make sense, relevant photo figure, some relevant references, but then odd, ambiguous figures without units, odd text, and irrelevant references. For example “The comprehensive evaluation of energy consumption and environmental pollution is obtained by measuring energy consumption and environmental pollution (Thilagaraj et al. 2020).”
(Thilagaraj M, Swetha NN, Pugazhendhi R, Rahul R (2020) Finger Vein Based Bank Security System. International Journal of Control and Automation 13(3):01–08.
Many more examples like this. This artful fake would escape detection unless the article was actually read by a human who understood the topic.
Some characteristics of the fake articles I noted in this journal include:
1. A single author, ostensibly from China with a *.163.com contact (mostly, some had 2 or 3 authors); AND
2. The article was not about a specific place, and no specific place was mentioned. Rather, it was about processes, such as using big data and data science processes at either indistinct places or else broadscale (i.e., China, western Pacific Ocean), AND
3. Ambiguous figures. Many were data flow charts, or ambiguous. (e.g., Fig 5 in article mentioned, Yield vs capacity of something, no units, no context
4. Complex equations that don’t make sense – no context or undefined terms.
5. References seem genuine, diverse,* and within the geosciences or computer sciences domain (mostly), but were irrelevant to the point cited.
(* No citation stacking, impact factor games apparent).
But unless someone actually read it, who would know? What is this – next gen SciGen, domain specific, coming soon to near you?
The strangeness of these article titles and the content makes me wonder if they are produced by field testing some kind of AI algorithm. i.e. can I make a programme that writes “scientific” papers that pass editorial scrutiny. Apparently the answer is yes…
Yes, that seems the right neck of the woods. Otherwise, why the absurd subject juxtapositions which have in the end given the game away?
There are more suspicious topical collections in that journal.
See https://pubpeer.com/publications/A13619347F351272DAFD9BC51E92C5
Do they all involve hijacked mailboxes?
Ha. Missed that one. So that’s the 4th “Responsible Editor” named (see comment and links in earlier comment). So there are more than 350 junk articles in this incident. Not the scale of fraud that PubPeer was set up to flag.
Still begs the question why? Hoping the perpetrators will (anonymously of course) explain their motivations. Testing and showing off their next gen “SciGenic” algorithms? Or also politically motivated? To show that there is little daylight between predatory and mainstream commercial publishers? The fact that Springer Nature has a thriving journal with a higher JIF than many society owned journals with no apparent oversight and quality control is cause for concern well beyond this incident.
I was wondering about a recent tranche of retractions from a special issue of “Personal and Ubiquitous Computing”, which has been overshadowed by the “Arabian Journal of Geophysics” retractions. 23 of 24 papers were retracted, while an Expression of concern still hangs over the 24th. The journal have scrubbed the special issue itself (“Autonomous vehicles: model development, policy design and system optimization”) from their website, so little information can be found except for a Facebook entry:
https://www.facebook.com/personalubicomp/posts/call-for-papers-autonomous-vehicles-model-development-policy-design-and-system-o/10160082411005449/
I did see, though, that one of the Guest Editors was Sheldon Williamson again. Presumably the malefactors took advantage of his hacked email account to pump bogus papers into PUC at the same time as AJG. Did Dr Williamson mention this other special issue when you were in contact with him?
What is my fault for disconnecting my paper from the Scopus database, if the journal Editors have made some errors? I’m not responsible for that. Please, I ask if the journal comes back to the Scopus database, my paper will be indexed or not. Note that when my paper was accepted the journal was still in Scopus.