Exclusive: Paper-mill articles buoyed Spanish dean’s research output

Last year, a professor and dean at a university in Spain suddenly began publishing papers with a multitude of far-flung researchers. His coauthors, until then exclusively national, now came from places like India, China, Nepal, South Korea, Georgia, Austria, and the United States.

How these unlikely collaborations began is not entirely clear. But a six-month Retraction Watch investigation, part of which is published here as a companion piece to a longer article appearing today in Science, suggests an unsavory possibility: The dean, Dionisio Lorenzo Lorenzo Villegas of the faculty of health sciences at Universidad Fernando Pessoa-Canarias, in Las Palmas, bought his way onto the papers – something he partly admits.

At least six of the seven journal articles Lorenzo published last year had been previously advertised for sale by the Indian paper mill iTrilon. Based in Chennai, this underhand operation sells authorship of “readymade” publications to scientists “struggling to write and publish papers in PubMed and Scopus-Indexed Journals,” according to a WhatsApp message its scientific director, Sarath Ranganathan, sent to prospective clients last summer. Ranganathan also claimed to have connections at journals that allowed him, in many cases, to guarantee acceptance of the manuscripts he would send their way. 

With academics across the globe under constant pressure to publish, paper mills have flourished, offering clients an easy, if unethical, way to pad their publication lists. Heightened media attention has followed. One of the most prominent cases to come to light is that of Spanish chemist Rafael Luque, a prolific and highly cited researcher, who last year was suspended without pay for 13 years by the University of Córdoba. 

During our investigation for Science, which focused on how paper mills have infiltrated the academic publishing industry, evidence emerged suggesting Lorenzo was a frequent customer of these shady middlemen, whose articles are often plagiarized or contain fake data. Among Lorenzo’s coauthors on the iTrilon papers were several journal editors and other university professors.

The first time Lorenzo’s name appeared alongside international coauthors was July 20, 2023, on a study exploring whether a compound derived from citrus fruits might protect against Alzheimer’s disease. Two weeks earlier, a young researcher visiting his parents in India had received a WhatsApp message from iTrilon. The paper mill touted an “original research article” that had already been accepted and would be published shortly in the non-indexed journal Life Neuroscience. Several author slots were available for anywhere between $290 and $400, according to the ad. 

The researcher, Siddhesh Zadey, now a PhD student at Columbia University, was intrigued. Posing as a naïve medical student, he inquired about the fifth author slot on the article and was told it was on “hold for another client.”

When the paper appeared online two weeks later, the fifth author was Lorenzo, who is also president of his university’s bioethics committee. 

Reached by phone in October, Lorenzo said as far as he recalled, he had offered his services to a company that was “looking for collaborators, mainly translators and reviewers,” on LinkedIn. Asked if the company’s name was iTrilon, he said, “Yes, I guess so.”

For the Alzheimer’s paper, which described a series of experiments in rats, Lorenzo said he did “the revision and edition [sic].” 

He acknowledged making a payment in relation to the manuscript, but said he believed it was meant to cover the journal’s article-processing charges (APC). As stated on Life Neuroscience’s website, however, articles submitted in 2023 and 2024 “will not be subject to” such charges.

A professor of neuroscience at a university in the United States said Lorenzo’s paper contained “several warning flags,” such as a lack of “critical experimental details,” “elementary” statistical errors, and unlikely histograms that always showed “a perfect monotonic decrease or increase” across experimental conditions. 

“This is highly improbable,” said the expert, who requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the case.

Nasrollah Moradikor of the International Center for Neuroscience Research, in Tbilisi, Georgia, the paper’s corresponding author and a high-level editor at Life Neuroscience, did not agree to be interviewed. He has published other studies in the past that contain the same type of basic errors and improbable results, including one in the MDPI title NeuroSci, according to the neuroscience expert.

Another one of Lorenzo’s coauthors – Indranath Chatterjee, a professor of computer science at Tongmyong University, in South Korea, and also an editor at Life Neuroscience – denied knowledge of any advertising for the paper. As reported in Science, Chatterjee gave a talk last autumn on scientific publishing organized by iTrilon and the International Center for Neuroscience Research.

Lorenzo did not reply to follow-up emails this year asking about his other iTrilon papers, which include:

• “Unravelling two fungal meningitis outbreaks in Mexico: An urgent call for multi-faceted action” (matching iTrilon ad)
• “Nanoencapsulated bioinks: The silver lining to safe tattoos and laser-assisted tattoo removal” (matching iTrilon ad)
• “Therapeutic effects of quercetin-loaded phytosome nanoparticles in a preclinical model of Parkinson disease: The modulation by antioxidant pathways and BDNF expression” (matching iTrilon ad)
• “Current Status and Emerging Trends in Colorectal Cancer Screening and Diagnostics” (matching iTrilon ad)
• “Innovative Biosensing Approaches for Swift Identification of Candida Species, Intrusive Pathogenic Organisms” (matching iTrilon ad)

Among the dean’s coauthors on two of the advertised papers is Paula Lamo Anuarbe, an associate professor at the International University of La Rioja, also in Spain. Lamo did not reply to repeated requests for comment, but an administrator at her institution was linked to paper mills last year.

Ariful Haque, an orthopedic surgeon at Yan’an Hospital Affiliated to Kunming Medical University, in China, who coauthored the paper on bioinks, said he and the other authors were “a team that works together and is concerned about global public health challenges.”

“I have not come across any adverts by iTrilon or any other organization for the selling of authorship in journals,” added Haque, who is an associate editor of Cell Press’ Heliyon Surgery, an assistant editor of Elsevier’s Journal of Orthopaedics, and an editor of Elsevier’s Medical Reports. “I want to clarify that I am strongly against collaboration with paper mills or unethical authoring techniques.”

Meanwhile, one of Haque and Lorenzo’s coauthors, ArunSundar MohanaSundaram of Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology in Chennai, the city were iTrilon is based, appears to be using authorship as a bargaining chip to boost his chances of getting published. 

Last May, the month before Zadey was contacted by iTrilon, MohanaSundaram sent him a message on LinkedIn requesting Zadey’s “valuable support as an EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBER” for “almost completed” papers on neuroscience and public health. (Zadey is not a member of any editorial boards.)

“I’m ready to offer ‘co authorship’ if you could review the work and support me as an EDITOR in reputed journals,” MohanaSundaram wrote. “Or maybe through bearing APC charges for papers, if you could support also I will offer authorship.”

MohanaSundaram did not respond to repeated emails, and it is unclear why he targeted Zadey. But a paper from last year of which MohanaSundaram and Lorenzo appear as coauthors, “Female house surgeon stabbed to death: High time for a multi-pronged action plan to prevent and manage violence against Health care workers,” relied on work Zadey and a colleague had published earlier in The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia.

“They used our work but they don’t cite us,” Zadey said. “Clearly this practice of trading authorships is costing researchers like me who put in the work because these folks won’t care about reading enough or citing appropriately.” 

Zadey didn’t find an iTrilon ad matching the article about the stabbed surgeon, but he said it may have been posted before he joined iTrilon’s WhatsApp group at the end of June last year. “The authors, the journal, the topic, and most importantly the way it’s written, it fits right into everything else that I’ve seen.”

Update, 1/19/24, 1345 UTC: Giulia Stefenelli, chair of the scientific board of MDPI, which published two of the papers in question, told us the publisher understands “the gravity of the concerns,” but: “At this time, there is no ethics investigation related to the articles mentioned. We appreciate your diligence and invite you to provide us with any other evidence or information that would support an official investigation. It is important to note that establishing a direct link between the articles and the content advertised by the cited platform is not an easy process. The titles of the articles and the number of authors do not immediately correlate with the published material. Should we receive further evidence that clearly distinguishes the relationship to the publications unequivocally, we will proceed to initiate an official investigation. I have included MDPI’s ethics department in this communication to raise awareness.”

Read our collaboration with Science here.

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