When Sam Payne reviewed a paper in March for Elsevier’s BioSystems, he didn’t expect to come across a figure he had created in his research. He quickly scrolled through the rest of the paper to find more figures, all copied from his work.
“It’s so blatant,” Payne, an associate professor of biology at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, posted on X.
Although the journal rejected the paper at Payne’s recommendation, he worried the authors would try to publish elsewhere.
“I had imagined they would just keep submitting it to new journals until it got accepted, because it was so brazenly plagiarized that they clearly didn’t care,” Payne told Retraction Watch.
Months later, Payne’s worry was justified. The paper, by researchers at First Moscow State Medical University, in Russia, appeared in Wiley’s Proteomics in May.
While the figures are obviously copied from his work, Payne says the text of the article also has been lifted.
“It seems like what happened is they just took sections of the manuscript and pushed it into an AI chatbot and said ‘summarize this for me,’ and then it came back with a reworded version,” Payne told us.
The corresponding author, Tatyana Degtyarevskaya, did not respond to our request for comment.
Payne’s posts on X about the whole experience received over 3 million views. They spurred Wiley to “immediately” initiate an investigation in accordance with Committee on Publication Ethics guidelines, said a spokesperson for Wiley, who told us the publisher will retract the article.
“This calls for a much better peer review system. Like we have to do better. We have to check figures for plagiairism [sic] – as has been strongly advocated for by [Elisabeth Bik]. I know it will be hard. But this appears to be our reality,” Payne tweeted in the thread.
Payne said he is brainstorming ways journals could combat chatbot-aided plagiarism, when it’s not obvious the text is a direct match: “This will be happening a lot I think, unless [they] do some real serious effort to prevent it.”
Update, 8/16/24, 1800 UTC: The plagiarizing paper has now been retracted. Most of the authors say they had nothing to do with the paper:
The above article, published online on May 3, 2024 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the journal Editor-in-Chief, Lucie Kalvodova; and Wiley-VCH GmbH. The retraction has been agreed due to a major unattributed overlap between the figures and figure legends of this article (Figures 2–7) and another article previously published elsewhere by a different group of authors [1]. Such publishing practice is against the journal’s policy and Wiley’s Best Practice Guidelines on Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics. The co-authors, I. Popova, T. Degtyarevskaya, D. Babaskin, and A. Vokhmintsev, stated that they did not participate in the writing and submission of the article and gave no consent for publication. E. Savelyeva remained unresponsive.
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A centralized database of peer reviews would help diminish the success of those who resubmit junk to multiple journals.
“one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”
Very good. Now I do dislike the new Hindawi which has become extremely slow and inefficient in the last months, but it does have its advantages that might sometimes surprise many:
Hindawi is perhaps the only publisher that has such a central peer review system for years. If someone gets a rejection from a Hindawi journal, then changes the title and text and try to resubmit his paper to another Hindawi journal, Hindawi will identify his manuscript as “previously rejected” and request the authors to first reply to the comments of previous reviewers and fully revise their paper, before even sending the manuscript to the editor let alone new peer reviewers.
Now that Hindawi is merged in Wiley, I guess perhaps they might have integrated this good policy into all 1600+200 journals of Wiley. But I don’t know yet; perhaps, RetractionWatch can investigate this, if interested (or if not already out there on the Internet).
ps. I know it has many many disadvantages! So don’t start counting them.
“They spurred Wiley to “immediately” initiate an investigation in accordance with Committee on Publication Ethics guidelines, said a spokesperson for Wiley, who told us the publisher will retract the article.”
The paper is now showing as having been retracted.
A puzzling notice btw: “The co-authors, I. Popova, T. Degtyarevskaya, D. Babaskin, and A. Vokhmintsev, stated that they did not participate in the writing and submission of the article and gave no consent for publication.” At the same time, T. Degtyarevskaya was the corresponding author for this article. How can someone submit a manuscript if he does not agree with submission?
@Sybil, very easily: The fraudulent person can impersonate the corresponding author by creating a fake email address similar to the real one, and using it to submit the paper under the name of the corresponding author, without the corresponding author knowing about this.
OR maybe the corresponding author is being dishonest here!
ps. Nowadays, in many journals, the submitting author can differ from the corresponding author. Many journals allow someone else to submit the paper *on behalf* of the corresponding author. This includes all Wiley journals, all legacy Hindawi journals, and many other journals.
Unfortunately, as the reply from Kayfabe mentions (and assuming the authors are being honest), this is not an uncommon practice, especially (and understandably so) in disciplines where shared authorship is the rule. You will in fact find several examples on this website of people whose names have been used and abused in publications to which they did not, in fact, contribute. There are situations in which some unscrupulous authors actually desire to have their names included in papers in which they had no participation (plenty of examples of this can be found here too!), but for any reaearcher worth their salt the misuse of their name is a very concerning matter.
Some journals send the acknowledgement letter to the corresponding author only, so it is possible. Although, sometimes the authors who have perpetrated plagiarism, try to deny their role and put the blame on others. I think a full investigation on the authors’ previous works will be useful.
It is the time to black list those authors and institutions who have more than one retraction due to author misconduct. Enough with this tolerance and compliance
Not easy to sort. Computer based solutions to identify copied figures will be useful and needs to be free to use for peer reviewers.
Tatyana Degtyarevskaya’s on Research Gate is, while we’re at it, diverse. Quite diverse. Suspiciously diverse.
While there is a chance that there might be more than one Tatyana Degtyarevskayas (hey, I’m pretty much “Jane Smith” equivalent in my language, so when you google my name, you’ll get translations, and articles ranging from dietetics, through linguistics and geology, to dentistry).
Also, there is a chance someone specializing in, say, cell biology might be engaged with different strains of medical research.
But proteomes, and forest vegetation, AND assessment of private tutors, *AND* digital literacy?
C’mon!
It’s Sechenov Medical University, after all.
Perhaps we should have learned something from the case of Dmitry Bokov, but have we really? After all, even Bokov himself is back into publishing, after a short pause.