Leslie McIntosh, like many other denizens of Science Twitter, saw a tweet from a pseudonymous account in mid-March that bemoaned a journal’s lack of action after the owner of the account reported “an obvious case of plagiarism.”
The owner of the account had found a paper that ripped off one by his or her own research group while browsing the literature. “It isnt just sentence copying, the whole structure and concept of the paper is THE SAME,” the account tweeted later in the thread.
McIntosh, CEO and cofounder of Ripeta, a tech company that offers automated tools to assess scientific papers, began looking into the paper and its corresponding author, Mohammed Sahab Uddin.
She found that Uddin, a neuropharmacology researcher whose publications abbreviate his first name as “Md,” had published more than 160 papers since 2016 while associated with Southeast University in Dhaka, Bangladesh, before beginning a PhD program at Hong Kong University.
Working with a colleague, she shared her findings with the university, which quickly started an investigation. In the wake of the inquiry, Uddin — who did not respond to our requests for comment — requested to withdraw from the PhD program.
At first, McIntosh said, she was just motivated by “curiosity” to do more research into Uddin. She ran the paper accused of plagiarism through Ripeta’s automated checks for signs of publication integrity and reproducibility, which include analyzing funding statements, conflicts of interest, ethics statements, a study’s objective/hypothesis, data availability, code availability, and software analysis. She also searched the Dimensions database for his other work and analyzed his public profiles on ORCiD and Publons.
Within days, Uddin apparently wiped his ORCiD profile, deleting all citations and references.
It felt like “things were moving fast,” McIntosh said, “and that meant mining as much information before information might be removed (which was the case).”
Using the Dimensions database, McIntosh found Uddin was listed as an author on more than 160 papers and book chapters published since 2016, and his work had been cited more than 3,600 times. Before his Publons profile was wiped, she saw he had more than 300 verified reviews.
Even that assessment of Uddin’s productivity may be an understatement, according to a biography of him on the website of publisher IGI Global, with whom he worked years ago as an editor:
Md. Sahab Uddin is a Registered Pharmacist and a Research Scholar in the Department of Pharmacy at Southeast University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. He has published copious articles in peer-reviewed international scientific journals. He has also authored and edited seven books, including Advances in Neuropharmacology: Drugs and Therapeutics; Handbook of Research on Critical Examinations of Neurodegenerative Disorders; and Oxidative Stress and Antioxidant Defense: Biomedical Value in Health and Diseases. Md. Uddin also serves as a guest editor, editorial and reviewer board member of numerous scholarly journals. He is a member of many national and international scientific societies. He has developed five neuropsychological tests for the estimation of memory, attention, and cognition. Moreover, he is the Founder and Executive Director of the Pharmakon Neuroscience Research Network, an open innovation hub bringing together neuroscientists to advance brain health. He received his BPharm in 2014 securing a first position from the Department of Pharmacy, Southeast University, Bangladesh. Md. Uddin’s research interest is how neuronal operation can be restored to abate Alzheimer’s dementia.
Uddin’s paper that sparked McIntosh’s investigation, “Exploring the Role of CLU in the Pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s Disease,” was retracted in May. According to the retraction notice in Neurotoxicity Research:
The Editors have retracted this article because a significant part of the content was paraphrased from another article by different authors (Foster et al. 2019). All authors disagree with this retraction.
Evangeline Foster, the corresponding author on the paper that was plagiarized, told us the process with the journal had been “ridiculous and long-winded”:
Despite clear plagiarism which was noted by the journal it still took over a year for the retraction to be recorded.
McIntosh consulted with a colleague, Simon Linacre, Head of Content, Brand and Press at Digital Science, which owns Ripeta, about what to do to publish her findings. After emailing Uddin and waiting two weeks for him to reply, their next step was to contact Hong Kong University, where Uddin was enrolled in a PhD program.
On June 8, Linacre emailed Danny Chan, Hong Kong University’s Director of Education and Development of Research Integrity, following up on previous emails about McIntosh’s findings and asking if the university had done anything to address the concerns.
Chan responded the same day that the university was looking into the matter, and the next day said that the case would be referred to the university disciplinary committee.
At the end of the month, Chan wrote that the university investigation had concluded and made “recommendations” to Uddin. On July 7, a staffer notified McIntosh and Linacre that Uddin would withdraw from Hong Kong University, effective August 1.
McIntosh said she was “impressed” with the investigation:
Dr. Danny Chan and his team at HKU were fantastic to work with. Reading and knowing how slow investigations can take, I was very impressed by both their speed, clarity, and thoughtfulness in communicating with them.
Chan declined to share details of the investigation and its findings with Retraction Watch.
McIntosh told Retraction Watch:
One could say I was interested in going down this rabbit hole because I have a company automating these checks. However, I built a company because I am curious about and trying to improve science, which means understanding how, why, and, when checks in science don’t work.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution 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].
Again, are we leaving it as an isolated ha-ha funny case? Just checking immediate co-authors yields a few more senior persons worth a deeper look.
For example, Tapan Behl: https://pubpeer.com/search?q=%22tapan+behl%22
Or Simona Gabriela Bungău: https://pubpeer.com/search?q=%22bungau%22
There will be more to come. Stay tuned.
Thanks! Looking forward for the development!
Menawhile, continuing the chain of co-authorships from either Bungău or Behl, we meet:
– Ebrahim Mostafavi (Stanford / Northeastern) – https://pubpeer.com/search?q=%22ebrahim+mostafavi%22
– and then Thomas Jay Webster (no longer at Northeastern) – https://pubpeer.com/search?q=%22thomas+j+webster%22
Who knew it was so easy to pretend to be a scientist? I’ll bet I could find a person who shares my name and take credit for all of their work, use those accolades on my own resume, forge a degree online and no one would be the wiser. At least for 2 or 3 years. By that time I’ll have moved on, of course. On to better things. Things more befitting a man of science.
I could care less about plagiarism it bothers me not in the least never has. Who cares if someone repeats in writing what someone else wrote.
Because they are lazy frauds looking for the easy way out. If I put in all the work and research, how dare they claim my work as theirs. I don’t know about research papers, but isn’t there a copyright law? I’d be litigating and having a discussion with HKU.
It is perfectly acceptable to repeat in writing what someone else wrote, provided you give them proper credit.
And if someone pretending to be you cashed your paycheck or stole from your bank account you’d be okay with that too?
Excellent point.
Thank you, Leslie, for following up and getting this particular person stopped. Plagiarism, misinformation, disinformation, isn’t there a system in place for the journal editors to check up on information before publishing? What happened to ethical journalism? The internet has no rules, but doesn’t the journal that publishes have oversight?
Here, I would like to thank McIntosh and her team for their contribution to better science and our society
👍
Grateful to help. Thanks for the acknowledgement.
Someone who has authored that many papers should raise a red flag immediately when they apply to a PhD program (actually they should always raise a red flag if they are not quite senior). The admission process at Hong Kong University has failed.
This means the university must have access to both a database with all the publications and a means to disambiguate the author’s name. If anything, it shows the cracks in our current ecosystem and that HKU is willing to improve.
This is more like an advertisement for universities to hire this company services than real news reporting. Anyone can start plagiarizing under a fake name and then start a company pretending to trace and verify such illegal activities. Conning is an art that works both ways.
Be careful with the enemies of your enemies :o)
Unfortunately, there are many examples of this issue in the academic environment. You can find so many PhD candidates, assistant professors and early-stage researchers who have a huge number of publications, and to my knowledge neither the Universities (the majority of them not all) nor the Journals show no concern about it. If you look deeper into those published works, you can find signs of gift authorship, citation manipulation and in some cases plagiarism. But unfortunately, the number of publications and the h-index never raise a red flag in these cases.
Thank McIntosh and her team.
Well done Leslie.
There are loads of such persons out there parading themselves as scholars. What annoys me most is that most of the works published by some of these “scholars” are research works carried out by students under them. They hijack these works and claim to be the authors. There should also be a check on this too.
Very right. Almost impossible to find out.
The word “scholar” is used for somebody who studied a lot but he/she hasn’t many original thoughts to share with the world. I suspect most “scholars” don’t even have the needed knowledge to teach in a university or even in a college.
Bravo to McIntosh and her team! Plagiarism has plagued many young academics because of new rules on promotion in the academia. Some senior academics are “grossly ” involved in this too. How can a non PhD holder author 7 books and more than 160 articles? What research yielded this quantity of results he is publishing? I guess globally, universities must look into the publish or perish syndrome. No academic should publish more than 20 papers before becoming a full Professor! except of course the person spent way above 10 years as a Senior lecturer.
This is good news!
Do you mean first author papers, or just papers? Not all academics go from undergrad to PhD; some spend a decade or so as lab techs before going into a grad program and, as such, end up on quite a lot of papers as co-authors. I dare say in a large lab it would be relatively easy to be a co-author on 20 papers based on what your role as a tech was. But yes…this man’s number of papers was ludicrous.
I am astounded to observe such a detailed investigation.
A researcher experiences mental and physical hardship while investigating their work. Unfortunately, a herd of cunnings steal the hardship and represent the original work as their own.
I would like to extend my thank to Ms McIntosh and her team for their regourus efforts to wipe out dirts.
Awaiting to see more from you!
Best,
The title sound very negative… Please change it. Nice work btw
What do you mean? The subject is already negative. Do you have any title ideas that would be more positive?
Just interested))
Yes, brilliant scientific researcher exposes plagiarism in scientific journals.
Also add more identifiers such as woman, young, person of color ,retired,published or professor.
The title really is fine. I read the article and subscribed so I think the title fid what it was supposed to, it got a nonscience person to read the article and become interested.
Sorry if you need to edit the reply. I have had a stroke.
Great follow through; shows your database will be robust and much needed by academia across the world.
Some people will plagiarize regardless the milieu, but Publish or Perish is the real demon destroying honest science.
Thank you kindly for your diligence.
I have noticed a few times that some peer reviewed information was retracted.
This gave me cause for concern as sometimes I pass on peer reviewed information to some friends and I was glad the information wasn’t passed on. (Not plagiarism but some inaccurate information)
Look until you know the full extent of a situation don’t speak on it you don’t work a day in her shoes I live her life you don’t know what she’s been through who are you to judge anyone.. you just never know what if they were looking for evidence on something. Or upset that someone else is getting credit for some one elses work I’m just a thing outside the box not all people do stuff for bad reasons
Good
Good thing I could get to the source as this (plagiarized?) Dhaka Tribune article is as clear as mud.
https://www.dhakatribune.com/education-feature/2022/08/26/when-a-tweet-exposed-plagiarism-by-bangladeshi-academic
Excellent work, McIntosh!
Glad someone out there cares to check this. I think you would do more if your company get support from these institutions to help conduct background checks on staff and PhD candidates. We can’t continue to embrace falsehood in the research community! Well done!
You can as well extend this work to Africa, I bet you will have tons of them already bragging as Professor!