After a sleuth reveals a paper with authorships advertised for sale, it’s retracted

Last August 12th, Nick Wise came across a Facebook post advertising the first, third, and fifth author positions for sale on a scientific paper with the same title as a recently published article.

Wise, a scientific sleuth whose work has resulted in more than 850 retractions, posted a comment on PubPeer with a screenshot of the advertisement and contacted the publisher of the journal. 

Six months later, the article, “Potential application of AlP nanosheet semiconductor in the detection of toxic phosgene, thiophosgene, and formaldehyde gases,” has been retracted. It had appeared in Semiconductor Science and Technology, an IOP Publishing title, and has been cited once.

Meanwhile, the authorship broker says he has left the business.

The retraction notice cited Wise’s PubPeer post, and detailed the publisher’s conclusion: 

that there is sufficient evidence to hand that supports several author positions were purchased. During this investigation, the journal became aware of additional concerns relating to this article, which includes portions of previously published works [1, 2] by different authors being drawn upon without sufficient attribution, and further indications that demonstrate the article was created, manipulated, and/or sold by a commercial entity.

Despite numerous attempts to receive further information, the journal has not received any conclusive evidence from the authors that refutes the concerns raised, including any materials that demonstrate the research was conceptualised and drafted by the author group. The evidence gathered by IOP Publishing to date considerably reduces confidence in the work, to the extent that IOP Publishing has made the decision to retract the work.

We emailed Hamzah Kzar, the paper’s corresponding author whose affiliation is listed as the veterinary medicine college at Al-Qasim Green University in Iraq, but haven’t heard back. 

Wise told us that the time it took IOP to retract the paper “seems reasonable when the authors have to have the chance to explain themselves,” but also said that the retraction “highlights how scientific publishing doesn’t appear to have a response yet to systematic abuse of the publishing process.” 

For example, Wise noted, Maria Jade Catalan Opulencia, one of the authors of the retracted paper whose affiliation is listed as the college of business administration at Ajman University in the United Arab Emirates, “suddenly published over 50 papers last year, despite having barely published before, and many of them have matching Facebook adverts on Pubpeer.” 

Opulencia is listed as a coauthor on three additional retracted papers about cancer biology, fuel cells, and nanoelectronics for which Wise identified authorships for sale. Her most recent paper on Google Scholar indicates it was published in Linguistica Antverpiensa, a Belgian linguistics journal that we previously reported had been targeted by hijackers attempting to sneak paper mill manuscripts into databases like Scopus under the auspices of a legitimate journal. 

Wise told us: 

I am pretty sure that all of her articles from last year had authorship sold, but as it stands every single one will have to have an individual investigation lasting months. Surely publishers should investigate all her articles, without someone needing to find a matching advert, email the editor and hope for a response.

Opulencia has not responded to our request for comment. 

Wise also noted that Salim Kallel, who had posted the advertisement about the recently retracted paper, had continued sharing “call[s] for co-authorship!!” on his public Facebook page until as recently as the end of February, though he had stopped including enough specific information for Wise to find the published papers. 

We contacted Kallel via the WhatsApp number listed on his recent ads and asked about his posts. He told us: 

All information is confidential and I don’t have the right to disclose any information about my clients.

Kallel also said he had stopped posting recently because “I don’t work more with that.” He has a new baby to take care of, he told us, and doesn’t expect to go back to the business.

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