In unusual move, publishers remove authors victimized by forger

Three major publishers have removed several authors’ names from five papers, most published a decade ago, following correspondence from an attorney representing one of the individuals.

Three of the papers appeared in PLOS ONE in 2013, one appeared in Springer Nature’s Tumor Biology the same year, and one appeared in Elsevier’s Obesity Research & Clinical Practice in 2014. As we reported in 2016, the journals retracted the articles because one of the authors – Lishan Wang – had forged the rest of his co-authors’ names and manipulated the peer review process.

Years later, Yongyong Shi, a distinguished professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Bio-X Institutes and one of the authors whose name Wang forged, hired a lawyer named Joseph Lewin, a solicitor with Dorsey & Whitney (Europe) LLP. Lewin, in turn, requested that the three publishers remove Shi’s name from the original papers.

Elsevier appears to have done that in September 2021. Springer Nature complied in March 2022. And PLOS did so in June 2022.

The move is “extremely rare,” Renee Hoch, managing editor of the PLOS Publication Ethics Team, told Retraction Watch. “Over a period of several years, I recall fewer than 5 cases at PLOS.” Hoch continued:

It is not uncommon for us to receive such requests from authors, but in accordance with the COPE Retraction Guidelines we almost always decline these requests and preserve the original published record of the research, including the article’s authorship and contributions. We hold authors to the contributor information they provided prior to publication, and we recognize that requests to remove authors following a retraction decision may be motivated by competing interests involving anticipated impacts of a retraction on the requestor’s professional standing.

However, we have had a couple of cases in which there was very strong evidence to support claims that an individual did not contribute to the published work and was included on an author list without their knowledge or consent. In these cases, we concluded that the individual in question was not truly an author of the article in question and we amended the published record accordingly.

Asked about any involvement from Shi’s attorney, Hoch said: “We cannot provide any details about this case beyond what was published in the retraction notices.”

A spokesperson for Springer Nature confirmed that Shi was removed as an author in March 2022, but said that “due to legal reasons, I’m afraid we cannot share any further information.” An Elsevier spokesperson would not confirm when Shi and the others were removed as authors, saying only:  “We are bound by confidentiality on this retraction, so the only official statement is the retraction notice itself.”

We learned of the authorship changes on Dec. 20, 2022, when Lewin emailed us a letter demanding we remove Shi’s name from the five relevant entries in the Retraction Watch Database. 

Lewin’s letter, which we interpreted as a legal threat, also demanded we respond within 10 business days. (Note that the letter arrived by email just a few business days before the traditional Christmas holiday.) 

“In the event that the confirmation requested above is not received within that time limit, our client will need to take the appropriate legal next steps,” Lewin concluded, citing various statutes. 

He told us this week that he was “sorry” we found the letter threatening, adding: “We do not agree with that characterisation.”

Judge for yourself. 

This was the first we had heard from Shi, or anyone representing him, since our post in 2016. We told Lewin that to make any changes to the database we would need to learn more about what had happened in the intervening years that prompted three major publishers to take an unusual step. We also informed him that for the sake of transparency – and because it is an interesting story about retractions – we would publish a post on Retraction Watch about the development.

Lewin did not agree, writing that “we do not understand that there would be any need to update previous coverage or to quote from any confidential correspondence.” He added: “If Retraction Watch believes it would be helpful to make a post, then we would require that the wording of such a post to be agreed in advance with our client to avoid any further damage being caused.”

Retraction Watch readers will not be surprised that we did not find that suggestion acceptable. 

After more than two months of back and forth, we asked Lewin for his client’s responses to these questions:

• Please tell us, in your own words, how you came to be listed as an author on the original paper.
• Please forward any reports of the “institutional investigation, conducted by the Administration Office of Bio-X Institutes at Shanghai Jiao Tong University,” referred to by several of the retraction notices.
• Please indicate what steps, including legal threats to journals and/or publishers, that you took to have your name removed as an author of the five papers to which your attorney’s Dec. 20, 2022 letter refers.
• Please forward any correspondence you and/or your attorneys have had with PLOS, Elsevier, and Springer Nature regarding these five papers.
• Please indicate when your name was removed from the original papers.
• We did not hear from you from 2017 until the letter from your attorney in December 2022, years after these entries were added to the database. Can you explain the delay?

Lewin reiterated – more gently this time – that he did not agree with our publishing a new post about this case:

We again repeat our client’s request that Retraction Watch reconsider whether it really wishes to publish an article in relation to our client.  He understandably wants nothing to do with these articles and does not want his name linked with them any further. 

He did not respond directly to the first question, writing only that

It is our understanding that Retraction Watch, which has published on this matter already, is aware that our client had no involvement in these articles, and that his name was falsely added to them without his knowledge. 

Given these circumstances, there is nothing surprising or unexpected about the fact that publishers would agree to remove an attribution of authorship in an article to an individual whom they know was not an author.

As we and PLOS’s Hoch noted, publishers ceding to such requests is unusual.

Despite the reports of the investigations having been shared with the three publishers, Lewin declined to share them with us, claiming that “the contents of the investigations, requested at bullet point two, are set out clearly in the retraction notes and letter statements by the publishers.”

We pointed out that all that was included in those retraction notices and letters – more on those later – were descriptions of what the report said, not “the contents of the investigations.” We and others have long recommended that universities make public in the interests of transparency and improvement.

Lewin also declined to share any of his letters to the three publishers, providing only one letter each from Elsevier and Springer Nature to him that he said “set out what had happened and explain why the publishers agreed to remove Professor Shi’s name.” He said “no equivalent letter exists in respect of the PLOS article.” As a condition of seeing those letters, we agreed not to publish them, but Lewin said we could “refer to, paraphrase or quote from them in a limited fashion.” 

The letter from Elsevier, dated Sept. 22, 2021, says that “the attribution was incorrect,” based on the publisher’s investigation and the university report, and that they had removed Shi as an author of the original article and published a retraction notice. That presumably refers to an updated retraction notice – confusingly labeled as an “erratum”:

The Publisher would like to bring to your notice that certain individuals who were listed as authors of the paper “Association between peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor, UCP3 and lipoprotein lipase gene polymorphisms and obesity in Chinese adolescents ” have informed the journal that this occurred without consent or knowledge of the submission. In addition the email address provided with the paper was not the correct email address. Please note that these authors previously identified by the submitting author as co-authors in the original publication of the paper were not the authors of this manuscript.

Elsevier also asks Shi to “Please accept our apologies that this occurred.”

The letter from Springer Nature, dated March 3, 2022, is similar, but does not include an apology.

Given that we consider publishers to be the entities that determine who an author is, and that they have removed Shi and others’ names from the original papers, we have done the same for the seven relevant entries – five retractions, and two corrections to relevant papers – in our database. (Note that Elsevier has done so inconsistently; Shi’s name is removed from the original article and a related erratum, but the publisher removed author Jianhua Chen only from the erratum. All other author names remain the same on both Elsevier pages.)

We of course still have questions about what happened between 2016 and 2022. When we asked Lewin for the second time to respond to our final question, about why we did not hear from his client for more than six years until receiving what we perceived as a legal threat from his solicitor, Lewin responded:

Our client does not propose to respond further.  For the sake of clarity, you will note that the answers to your first and last questions are already set out in the letter that we sent to you in December 2022.

As readers will see, they are not.

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