Anca Turcu was going over her publication stats a few weeks ago, as she does every year to apply for research awards and update her CV, when she found an “unpleasant surprise.”
Turcu, a senior lecturer in the University of Central Florida’s School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs, was listed as the sole author of an article entitled “Impact of government intervention measures on recycling of waste equipment in China,” which had been published in the African Journal of Political Science in February 2022.
She hadn’t written the paper, which had nothing to do with her research on diasporas and voting. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
As Retraction Watch looked into the case, we found something “very upsetting,” in Turcu’s words. The article with her name on it appeared to paraphrase, sentence by sentence, a paper that had been published in another journal a few months prior.
“Not only are they faking a publication in my name, but they are adding my name to something they have plagiarized?” Turcu asked. “This is absolutely terrible! What is it with these people?”
The earlier article’s title was nearly identical, and it had appeared online in the Elsevier journal Energy Policy in November 2021. It has been cited ten times since, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The one with Turcu’s name on it was received at the journal in January 2022.
We emailed the authors of the Energy Policy paper, who are affiliated with Tongji University in Shanghai, to ask if they were aware of the plagiarism, but they didn’t reply. We also emailed Stephen D. Thomas, senior and coordinating editor of the journal and a professor at the University of Greenwich in London, and got an out of office response.
The African Journal of Political Science is published by International Scholars Journals (ISJ).The journal’s website states this policy on plagiarism:
The editors of ISJ take a very serious stance against any evidence of plagiarism including self-plagiarism in manuscripts submitted to them. Every reasonable effort will be made to investigate any allegations of plagiarism brought to their attention, as well as instances that come up during the peer review process.
We notified Jephias Mapuva, the editor in chief of the journal and a professor at the Bindura University of Science Education in Zimbabwe, of the plagiarism, and the fact that Turcu was not involved with the paper that had her name on it. He has not responded to our email.
Our email to the address listed on the paper as Turcu’s, which does not belong to her, bounced back.
ISJ states on its website that it “is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and abides by its Code of Conduct and aims to adhere to its Best Practice Guidelines.” We could not find the publisher in COPE’s member directory.
The experience has prompted Turcu to wonder:
Why the heck me??? I have nothing to do with that subject matter, never saw that article before, what on earth made them do this? I do not think I’ve ever interacted with anyone from this fake journal, or anyone who wrote the legitimate article, so… I am really at a loss.
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This is an interesting case, but the article doesn’t go into any detail about the motivation for the publisher or another unnamed author to publish such an article. Is this a subscription journal charging fees to libraries or an open access journal charging APCs? There are many scams out there, but it isn’t clear what the scam is with this particular case. Please publish another article with more information, so other publishers can look for similar scams.
I have the impression that Dr. Ana Turcu’s family comes from Romania. In the former socialist states of Eastern Europe, selfless malice was the order of the day. Probably someone very reluctant and hateful of her decided to put her on a scientific land mine that is able to blow up anyone. You can be a false reviewer as well as a false author by using fake emails.
It might also be an attempt to improve the image of the journal, by having a researcher known in some field listed as an “author” in the journal. Although, that would make more sense if the fake article was related to the field of the impersonated researcher.
Scamming for subscription fees seems a reasonable explanation for this weird case, with the perpetrators’ numbskullery evident: wouldn’t it be far less effort for the “journal” to employ the standard business model of plagiarizing/reproducing papers in their entirety, or utilizing machine-derived non-papers?
An alternate, but equally if not more unpleasant, explanation is that Prof. Turcu has a rival/competitor/enemy who submitted this paper with the intention of buttressing a later “J’accuse!” campaign against her.
This definitely seems to be a highjacked journal since there seems to be a ‘real’ African Journal of Political Science – https://www.ajol.info/index.php/ajps/index
The ‘real African Journal of Political Science which covers 1996-2004 is also on JSTOR (Vol. 1, No. 1 – Vol. 9, No. 1) with ISSN 1027-0353
The International Scholar’s Journal also includes this same ISSN and covers 2007 vol 1 to vol 16 2022.
I agree it seems to be hijacked
“International Scholars Journals (ISJ)” is a predatory publisher.
OMICS journals already have a reputation (especially their Prime Scholars imprint) for generating completely fake papers and publishing them under hijacked names – including the names of famous novelists – in order to pad out the page count and make the journals look slightly less scammy. My guess is that something similar happened here.
As indicated this publisher International Scholars Journals is according to the well-known Beall’s list https://beallslist.net not only (potentially) predatory but also linked to Longdom Publishing SL. which is on their turn linked to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMICS_Publishing_Group
I recommend everybody to read the highly interesting (and disturbing) findings by Smut Clyde about Prime Scholars, Hilaris, etc. where it is demonstrated that more players are known for this type of scientific publishing misconduct:
https://forbetterscience.com/2023/01/25/the-pullulating-polyps-of-omics/
PS. It is the same type of scam as described last weekend here on Retraction Watch with the story “A journal publishes a paper by Victoria Braithwaite, who is known for showing fish can feel pain…and who died in 2019.”, the publisher which seems to be associated with the journal is…. Hilaris
“It is the same type of scam as described last weekend here on Retraction Watch with the story “A journal publishes a paper by Victoria Braithwaite, who is known for showing fish can feel pain…and who died in 2019.”, the publisher which seems to be associated with the journal is…. Hilaris”
I’m just chiming in here to agree with Rob. It’s an OMICS journal now, either bought or hijacked.
https://twitter.com/SmutClyde/status/1649025141861662720
I found this interesting blog post about the journal: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scam-journal-pretending-real-thing-nadine-bekkouche
Looks like this journal was a legit one but discontinued in 2004. Now it is revived (or hijacked?) and becomes a predatory journal?
This global academic fraud has to be stopped. It is an act of illegality
I was hoping there would be some form of action the readers would be called to, to help resolve this or expedite such an effort. The situation is quite surprising.
Please clarify situation “when a journal erroneously publish the same article of an author in two different volumes without consent of the author” Does this qualify the article for retraction or withdrawal of the article volume that was mistakenly published by the editor ? .
To the best of my knowledge, this is caused by online vs print version. These days, articles are online far before they are actually printed (sometimes up to a year)
I have seen this happen a number of times. Journals lose track of the papers they have already published, and publish the same paper twice. Or they request changes to the paper, and then publish both, the first version and the revised one.
Scientific publication is no longer about communication, but about making money and obtaining publication credits….
As a relative outsider who happens to have an interest in publication ethics (and lapses thereof), I have a suspicion that some person(s)/group(s) might be testing the publishing industry fairly broadly to see what they can get away with, and which such efforts get caught and how and why. If so, could this be one such case? Sadly, there have always been unethical individuals who publish papers, but now I suspect that someone might be creating AI algorithms to automate the process. I hope I’m wrong. I worry that such people could pursue profit and/or social motives instead of publishing their findings along with methods to thwart such efforts.
Instances of this kind and some other ethical issues can be reduced, if there is standard requirement for authors to use institutional emails, instead personal emails, when the authors have an affiliation in their bio.
I had the exact same thing happen to an academic affiliated to my insitution.
She got a google alert (Aug. 2022) that she had just pubilshed in the /European Journal for Biomedical Informatics/. She never submitted to the publisher and upon investigation we found that it was a poorly plagiarised atricle from something she did publish back in 2016 in PLOS Computational Biology. We also established that the EJBI was not a legitimate journal (https://efmi.org/2020/05/31/special-announcement-european-journal-for-biomedical-informatics-ejbi-no-longer-under-status-official-journal-of-efmi/) even though they claimed to follow both COPE and ICMJE guidelines.
Unlike traditional predatory publications, she hadn’t purposefully (or even accidentally) submitted to the journal, nor had she paid them any fees. So the conclusion we reached was the same, that the EJBI wanted the name of a prominent scientist and institution in their journal to “appear legitimate”.
We alerted our IP and legal offices, PLOS, and the EJBI. Nothing helped. In March the EJBI changed the name and affiliation of the article to an academic at Kyushu University. PLOS weren’t able to help us, since it is a plagirised version of their article.
_Original plagiarised version_: https://www.ejbi.org/scholarly-articles/triumphs-and-improvement-of-computational-bioinformatics-in-south-africa.pdf
_Version attributed to another academic (still plagiarised)_: https://www.ejbi.org/scholarly-articles/triumphs-and-improvement-of-computational-bioinformatics-in-south-africa-10872.html
The contact info used by the ‘journal’ EJBI is “Avenue Roger Vandendriessche, 18, 1150 Brussels, Belgium” and this is the same as “Longdom Publishing SL” As indicated before this ‘publisher’ is part of the OMICS empire of deception. This example is another proof that this sad and blunt practice of scientific misconduct is part of their deception scheme which is hard (and apparently impossible) to tackle.
By exposing them, warning and educating researchers might help to prevent that these fraudsters will make more victims and eventually shut down this despicable ‘business model’.
@Rob. In August last year I did everything I could think of, I went to their supposed Editorial Board and Googled many of the names, especially the ones in South Africa and Africa. Most of the people I googled (not the whole list) didn’t even exist. I even went to the website hosts to see if they would remove the website and reported it to Google and Microsoft.
I suppose the high-level question we need to contemplate is how do we protect our researchers from scientific fraud, when they don’t actively seek it out? I am not sure there is an answer to that question, certianly not based on my current skill set.
But yes, training, development and education are all critical tools we have to support our researchers.
Apparently this European Journal for Biomedical Informatics was founded with EU support. “Over its 15 years of existence, EJBI continuously received higher recognition and international acknowledgement”. Then the founders decided it was time to entrust the legacy of their creation to professional publishers, but they chose OMICS instead.
https://efmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/History-of-EJBI-%E2%80%93-Janas-Legacy.pdf
As Paula Saner said, the European Federation for Medical Informatics subsequently disowned EJBI, and last I heard they were preparing legal action against OMICS to stop them from claiming that EJBI was an affiliated journal.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E4mp_JNVgAIsfo5.jpg
One thing I find striking about this story is that Dr. Turcu is a “senior lecturer,” which in the United States suggests that she is not tenured or on the tenure-track. It seems especially noxious to be targeting someone in that precarious position, but then I wonder if the journal scammer knows that people in that sort of position are less able to fight back and so preferentially victimizes people who are less likely to have deep institutional support.
The link to the forged/plagiarized article now returns a 404 error. I’m not sure if that’s Retraction Watch getting results and causing them to take it down, they’re just shifty and always have their illegitimate articles have a short half-life, or they’re bad at website configuration and broke their own links, but it seems like a positive development for Professor Turcu.
If anyone still wants to see the article referenced, it is at https://web.archive.org/web/20230424122015/https://www.internationalscholarsjournals.com/articles/impact-of-government-intervention-measures-on-recycling-of-wasteequipment-in-china-86363.html
The fake article’s disappearance looks to me like the result of Retraction Watch’s reporting. Other clearly fake, low-quality articles on the journal’s web site that are attributed to legitimate social scientists remain up. It’s only the Turcu article that has vanished. I don’t know what RW did, but someone else should do more of it to clean house over there.
The journal seems to have done a more extensive clean-up now: the entire “archive” of back issues that was at https://www.internationalscholarsjournals.com/african-journal-political-science/archive.html has now been memory-holed, with most of the articles claiming to be from authors widely published in mainstream academic journals having disappeared.