On a Friday in July, Laura Schaefer Googled herself to find her ORCID researcher ID for a paper submission.
To her surprise, a paper popped up with her name in a journal she’d never published in. Her surprise quickly turned to concern – had someone copied one of her articles?
As she searched the site where the work appeared, she found more articles with her name, covering subjects she had never written about and with co-authors she didn’t know.
“[I] became angrier the more I found, and also started feeling really violated that someone had used my name and title to put forward something that wasn’t scientifically rigorous,” Schaefer, a professor of mechanical engineering at Rice University in Houston, said.
Schaefer found a total of four papers bearing her name, on topics far from her expertise such as agriculture and waste disposal. The articles appeared in the Journal of Robotics Spectrum, Journal of Machine and Computing and Journal of Computing and Natural Science, all titles belonging to a publisher in Kenya called AnaPub. None of the journals is indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science.
According to their website, AnaPub is a “globally active publisher” with a mission to provide opportunities for authors to “publish their high-quality articles on the world [sic] best platform.” In July, Schaefer wrote to Emmanuel Sikuku Ogutu, AnaPub’s managing editor, asking him to remove the four papers attributed to her and linked to her Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID).
Ogutu apologised for incorrectly linking to her ID, but said his team had “successfully verified the authorship” of “Mr. Laura Schaefer,” who was “a past alumnus [sic] of Rice University.”
Schaefer promptly responded that she knew for a fact, as former department chair of Mechanical Engineering at Rice, there had never been another student with her name in the Mechanical Engineering Department or within the entire School of Engineering.
Lawyers for Rice also contacted a former student with a relatively similar name, Lauren Schaefer DiGloria, who confirmed she never authored any papers.
In emails seen by Retraction Watch, Rice’s lawyers demanded AnaPub remove the publications immediately and threatened a lawsuit for fraud. In a response on July 29, Ogutu said AnaPub has given “Mr. Laura Schaefer” 60 days to verify their identity. Schaefer and her team at Rice have not heard from Ogutu or anyone at AnaPub since. AnaPub also did not respond to our requests for comment.
Arvind Atreya, Schaefer’s supposed co-author on two of the papers, is also listed as a faculty member at Rice. Atreya is in fact a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He confirmed he did not write the papers, either.
The articles list email addresses for Atreya and Schaefer at Rice’s domain that bounced back when we attempted to contact them. Another address listed for Schaefer at “hotmail.com” didn’t bounce, but no one replied.
Schaefer has her doubts whether other authors named on papers on AnaPub’s website are truly connected with the work. They are “all people from very well-respected institutions,” she said. All four papers remain on AnaPub’s website credited to Laura Schaefer.
We’ve previously covered other cases of forged authorship on papers that appeared to have been plagiarized. One of the papers, falsely attributed to Anca Turcu of the University of Central Florida, has been taken down, but the other, naming Steffen Barra of the University of Saarland in Germany, is still online.
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You would think Anapub would be fairly aggressive at addressing this considering 1 of their 6 journals is currently indexed by Scopus (Journal of Machine and Computing: https://www.scopus.com/sourceid/21101133571) and that Scopus has been on an apparent de-indexing warpath the last several months over nonsense like this. 4/6 journals started in 2021, the other 2 in 2023 (see the Periodicals tab on page for Anapub on PSIref (https://psiref.com/publishers/171144675). All of Anapub’s journals are submitting their metadata to Crossref.
I was able to locate 3 of the 4 fraudulent papers using Dr. Schaefer’s identity.
1) Journal of Computing and Natural Science,
“Exploring the Potentials and Challenges of Renewable Energy Sources”
doi : 10.53759/181x/jcns202404009
PSIref @ https://psiref.com/publications/193793821
2) Journal of Robotics Spectrum
“An Emerging Era of Artificial Intelligence Research in Agriculture”
doi : 10.53759/9852/jrs202301004
PSIref @ https://psiref.com/publications/189735216
3) Journal of Machine and Computing
“Nonconventional Machining and Materials Processing: Proposed Design for Abrasive Jet Machining (AJM)”
doi : 10.53759/7669/jmc202101001
PSIref @ https://psiref.com/publications/172976435
Since Atreya is apparently MIA/non-responsive, and Dr. Schaefer has declared she isn’t the actual author and “Laura Schaefer” is sole author on the other 2 papers listed above, it would seem highly unlikely that this is an “authorship for sale scheme”. This leaves 2 obvious options:
a) its a citation vehicle scheme – it may be an interesting/informative exercise to do a Qui Bono on the reference lists (see PSIref links above – all reference lists are in listed in reverse chronological order – most recent published papers first).
b) unsavory editors puffing up their journal content with dubious/fake/fraudulent papers to give the appearance of a robust and high impact journal.
Any other schemes I’m missing?
Years ago this happened to a grad student in my field, and I suspect it was an authorship-for-sale scam: a scammer gets papers accepted using known authors to increase odds of acceptance, and then charges for co-authorship once the paper is accepted somewhere.
One symptom of the scam is that the author list of a paper dramatically changes between acceptance and camera-ready copy. I witnessed a few cases of this when I was a program chair for a workshop—whereupon the “authors” would be no-shows—and it required us to adopt stricter submission guidelines.
This is partly what happened to Hindawi last year. Since its 11,000-retraction scandal, now Hindawi (and Wiley) doesn’t allow any deletions, additions, or reordering of authors after submission.
They make the authors pledge this both in the manuscript and also as direct a response to Hindawi’s email asking them to confirm that they do know that the authors’ names cannot change.
Many Springer journals as well have very strict policies for adding names. I haven’t seen this in Elsevier journals.
I obviously don’t know for sure, but I tend toward guessing option (b), especially since three of the “papers” are in vol. 1 of their “journals.” I haven’t contacted the other authors on the other papers in those issues, but if you look at the contact information (in https://anapub.co.ke/journals/jmc/jmc_list/2021/volume_01_issue_01/jmc_volume1_issue1.html for example), the addresses are all very fake-seeming. I lot of hotmail and outlookmail addresses, that when googled only show Anapub papers (or mentions of them). “My” email addresses are given as [email protected] and [email protected] – the second one is obviously fake, and the first one is slightly more clever, but fake as well.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown if (a) could be true as well, though – why not both, after all?
(Also, Arvind Atreya has also been confirmed to not be the author, fwiw, fully aside from not being a faculty member at Rice!)
Can still have a version of authorship for sale. Contacted that article in your field will be published and will include “you” as a co author if you will contribute to publication fees
An instructor recently contacted me for copies of articles that were made up. I question the authenticity of the paper that contain the references to me. Additionally, I do not know whether the paper was AI or human fabrication. Yet the instructor was reluctant to accept my word that the articles were false, since they found references to them on the Internet. The latter suggests a mode of validation that marginalizes the authority of the writer. It is impossible to share something that does not exist.