A journal quietly retracted two papers after a six-month Retraction Watch investigation linked them, and two of the journal’s editors, to the Indian paper mill iTrilon.
Based in Chennai, iTrilon hawks authorship of “readymade” publications to scientists “struggling to write and publish papers in PubMed and Scopus-Indexed Journals.” The company, whose website disappeared following our exposé in Science, claims to have connections at journals that allow it to guarantee acceptance of many of its papers.
The two retracted papers – “Evaluation of the neuroprotective activity of citral nanoemulsion on Alzheimer’s disease-type dementia in a preclinical model: The assessment of cognitive and neurobiochemical responses” and “Therapeutic effects of quercetin-loaded phytosome nanoparticles in a preclinical model of Parkinson’s disease: The modulation by antioxidant pathways and BDNF expression” – had both been put up for sale by iTrilon before they appeared last year in the non-indexed journal Life Neuroscience.
We published the matching ads last week in a companion piece to the Science article that linked a professor and dean at a university in Spain to several iTrilon papers. The dean, Dionisio Lorenzo Lorenzo Villegas of Universidad Fernando Pessoa-Canarias, in Las Palmas, acknowledged paying the paper mill, but said he thought the money was meant to cover article-processing charges. He has since taken down his LinkedIn profile.
The editor-in-chief of Life Neuroscience, Nasrollah Moradikor of the International Center for Neuroscience Research, in Tbilisi, Georgia, confirmed the journal had pulled Lorenzo’s two papers, although it has not issued retraction notices.
“Today, I asked our managing editor and told them about Dionisio Lorenzo Lorenzo Villegas, his article retracted from our journal website [sic],” Moradikor wrote in a January 22 email to Retraction Watch.
But as we reported in Science, Moradikor was the corresponding author of the paper about Alzheimer’s disease, which was touted by iTrilon after being accepted by the journal and just two weeks before publication. As such, he should have known about author additions.
According to a WhatsApp exchange about the paper, iTrilon’s scientific director, Sarath Ranganathan, described it as “a collaborative research carried out at Georgia [sic]. Authors from any country are allowed.”
Moradikor, who stopped answering emails in October after we told him we were interested in discussing “your work as an editor and your connection with iTrilon,” now denies any links with the paper mill.
“I’m shocked, that you mentioned me and Dr. Indranath Chatterjee [a coauthor on the Alzheimer’s paper] on this News,” he wrote in his email. “We don’t have any relation with Itrilon and Dionisio Lorenzo Lorenzo Villegas in Spain.”
But last autumn, Chatterjee gave a talk on scientific publishing organized by iTrilon and the International Center for Neuroscience Research, as we reported in Science. And in an October interview, Chatterjee, who is also an editor at Life Neuroscience, said Lorenzo had been involved in the work for the Alzheimer’s paper “mostly like for the supervising and also kind of reviewing and like checking the paper and the manuscript are properly written or not.”
Asked how he had met Lorenzo, Chatterjee said, “Actually, like, you know, it was in connection with the International Center for Neuroscience, not with me.”
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