A university investigation in Hong Kong found that a professor used the email account of a former student to conduct all the correspondence needed to edit special issues of two journals, Retraction Watch has learned.
The two special issues, which were published last year, are full of articles with the hallmarks of paper mills, said Dorothy Bishop, an Oxford psychologist and scientific sleuth who flagged the matter to the institution involved in the case.
Last November, Bishop emailed the president of Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) with the information that Kaifa Zhao, a PhD student at the university, was listed as the lead editor for two special issues of the Journal of Environmental and Public Health and Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, both journals published by Hindawi. The nearly 300 articles in the special issues were “mostly meaningless gobbledegook” that suggested they came from a paper mill, she wrote.
The episode is the latest of many problems involving questionable peer review of special issues – and subsequent retractions – we’ve covered.
“There is no question that whoever is letting these fraudulent papers into the literature is guilty of serious academic fraud,” Bishop wrote, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch. “The only possible defense that I can imagine is if Mr Zhao Kaifa is a victim of identity theft.”
According to the university’s response to Bishop, that’s indeed what happened.
PolyU’s Department of Computing convened a panel to meet with Zhao and his supervisor 10 days after receiving Bishop’s email. In the meeting, Zhao said that Yizhang Jiang, one of the supervisors of his master’s degree studies at Jiangnan University in Wuxi, China, “borrowed” his Hindawi journal account and PolyU email account and passwords and used them to edit the special issues. It’s unclear why he did so.
“According to Mr Zhao, he was not aware of relevant emails from Hindawi and has never responded to emails that are related to the two special issues,” a university staffer wrote to Bishop.
The university contacted Jiang, who confirmed that he had been “managing” Zhao’s accounts. The researcher said that Zhao did not know he was named an editor of the journal special issues until Bishop’s emails. Both Zhao and Jiang told the university that Zhao didn’t receive any payments related to the special issues.
As for consequences, the university’s email stated:
The panel reminded Mr Zhao regarding proper use of his email account and personal data protection in the meeting. Mr Zhao admitted and understood that he should not have shared information of his PolyU account email and password with others.
The email also said that the department would refer the matter to the university’s IT office “to further investigate if Mr. Zhao has been involved in any misconduct related to these two journal special issues through the usage of his PolyU email account, and will consider proper penalty to be imposed onto the student.”
Neither Zhao nor Jiang has responded to our requests for comment.
We reached out to Hindawi for comment on PolyU’s findings, as well as the PubPeer posts about papers in the two special issues, “Advanced Big Data Analysis Technologies for Environmental Monitoring Data,” and “BCI-based Mobile Computing in the Internet of Medical Things.” A spokesperson replied:
We are investigating these papers and will take appropriate action on the articles and author in question.
“The whole thing is a huge mess,” Bishop told us when we asked for her take on the situation. She continued:
My personal view is that where we have editor of a special issue that contains clearly weird content – with inappropriate citations, gobbledegook text, content that is way off topic – then the default assumption should be that the editor is working for a paper mill and all content of the special issue is suspect and needs to be retracted. If more evidence is needed, it should be obtained from the peer review record – my guess is that this would reveal superficial and very rapid reviews that totally fail to engage with the content (such as it is) and may come from reviewers with fake email addresses.
Instead, we seem to have a system where the publisher is slowly going through articles one at a time, checking with the authors and editors (who may be using fake email addresses from paper mills, and so can slow things down by delayed replies or silence), and using a very high bar of evidence for retraction.
Separately, last October Bishop contacted the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), an index of journals that publish papers without paywalls, about Hindawi titles on its list with paper mill content. One of those journals was the Journal of Environmental and Public Health, for which Zhao had appeared to edit a special issue.
Bishop told us:
I think DOAJ, and indeed other indices, could play an important role in delisting journals found to have more than a minimal level of paper mill content, as this would remove the value to those placing articles there.
The only issue then is the collateral damage to honest authors who have published in those journals – I’m sure these do exist, and it is very unfortunate that they will find themselves published in a journal that has a tainted reputation.
Within a few days of Bishop’s email, a DOAJ staffer told her by email:
We would be happy to work with you and other members of the research community to be able to identify these problems sooner, remove offending journals from DOAJ and try to ensure these practices are eliminated as soon as possible.
However, months later, no Hindawi journals seem to have been removed from DOAJ’s index. Bishop said:
I always hope organisations will act more quickly than they do, but I think DOAJ behaved reasonably, but were perhaps too trusting that Hindawi would take the initiative in getting paper mill content removed quickly. To my mind the key question is whether DOAJ will now act quickly to suspend from the register the journals that have been identified as having a very large number of PubPeer comments by paper mill sleuths.
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A very distressing situation. Especially the part where PolyU seems to be blaming the student (Zhao) for the identity theft:
“The email also said that the department would refer the matter to the university’s IT office “to further investigate if Mr. Zhao has been involved in any misconduct related to these two journal special issues through the usage of his PolyU email account, and will consider proper penalty to be imposed onto the student.”
There is nothing in this account that suggests that PolyU sees Jiang as facing any penalty for the e-ID theft.
The supervisor/student relationship is one of unequal power–could the student have refused the request from one of his supervisors to “borrow” his e-ID?
The student should know to inform the institution if their advisor is clearly violating policy on data integrity, especially by using their identity. This may be an institutional failure more than the fault of the student (especially if the student did not report out of fear of retaliation), but I think at most universities the idea that you should never share passwords is made abundantly clear.
That said, the advisor is clearly the architect of misconduct. I don’t think the student is completely absolved of wrongdoing unless the institution dropped the ball, but their actions are still mitigated somewhat.
“Jiang, one of the supervisors of [Zhao’s] master’s degree studies at Jiangnan University in Wuxi, China”
PolyU in Hong Kong is not in a position to discipline Jiang.
“The supervisor/student relationship is one of unequal power–could the student have refused the request from one of his supervisors to “borrow” his e-ID?”
Details of the chronology are missing. For Jiang to have been in a position to extort Zhao’s e-ID, Zhao would have to have signed up with Hindawi as a Guest Editor while he was still just a masterate student at Jiangnan University.
I think all the special issues’ papers should be checked for possible retraction.
There are some claims without enough evidence against Jiang. A possibility is to hack the lead editor’s email account like the thing happened in Springer: https://retractionwatch.com/2021/11/04/springer-nature-geosciences-journal-retracts-44-articles-filled-with-gibberish/
There are many agencies in China which try to steal the entity of scientists for making special issues and fake peer reviews. I think the allegations about a university professor based on some student claims may make the situation complicated.
The university contacted Jiang, who confirmed that he had been “managing” Zhao’s accounts.
A thing does not make sense in the university story, they want to change the reality or part of it. “Jiang has approved his management” it is based on the PolyU claim.
This matter where a substantial number of paper are compromised is most likely the reason why the journal “Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience” is added to the list of discontinued titles in Scopus (Jan 2023).
For the latest Scopus source list, go to homepage Scopus https://www.scopus.com/home.uri scroll down and click on “Scopus source list”).
Goodness. If these are all the details of the story, then there is a faculty member here who has abused his privilege, yet the university chooses to throw the book at the graduate student? Wow. Where is the social justice here?
What they’ve done with the student does not look like throwing the book at to me: they’ve essentially slapped his wrist for sharing his password and warned him that he could loose his IT account if that happens again, which seems quite appropriate.
Jiang clearly deserves to face dire consequences, but the article states that he works for a different university (Jiangnan University). There is most likely very little that PolyU can do about him, besides informing his university and hoping for the best.
“It’s unclear why he [Jiang] did so.”
“Both Zhao and Jiang told the university that Zhao didn’t receive any payments related to the special issues.”
One can speculate about Jiang’s motives.
Maybe Jiang is protecting someone or something whilst there has not been a solid evidence against himself. In addition, as the investigation process is still ongoing by Hindawi, how and why should such a news be posted online through Retraction Watch mentioning the names of two scientists? And being mill-processed (for all papers) has been confirmed so far!
In my opinion, all the current page must be removed before facing legal reactions.
And no one questions if a PhD student is qualified for a guest editor’s role.
How come the students gave password access to the professor?? Blind trust will destroy lives!
Obviously, all these junk papers should be retracted.