Tips we get about papers and books citing fake references have skyrocketed this year, tracking closely with the rise of ChatGPT and other generative large language models. One in particular hit close to home: A paper containing a reference to an article by our cofounder Ivan Oransky that he did not write.
The paper with the nonexistent reference, published November 13 in DARU Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, criticizes platforms for post-publication peer review — and PubPeer specifically — as being vulnerable to “misuse” and “hyper-skepticism.” Five of the paper’s 17 references do not appear to exist, three others have incorrect DOIs or links, and one has been retracted.
One of the fabricated references credits our cofounder Ivan Oransky with a nonexistent article, “A new kind of watchdog is shaking up research,” purportedly published in Nature in 2019.
Other references include nonexistent articles credited to sleuth Elisabeth Bik, molecular biologist and sleuth David Vaux – a member of the board of directors of The Center for Scientific Integrity, our parent nonprofit – and Stanford’s John Ioannidis. The DOI provided for Vaux’s supposed article on scientific misconduct is actually an interview with biochemist Peter Macheroux. The DOI attributed to Ioannidis leads to a study of steroid-induced bone death in rabbit hips.
Maria Hodges, the publishing director at Springer Nature, which hosts the journal, told us the matter was “a complex case and set of circumstances involving a journal that is owned by an external party.” The publisher was “working to clarify a number of issues relating both to the references and the editorial handling of the case,” Hodges added.
The article quickly drew attention as well as dozens of comments on, perhaps unsurprisingly, PubPeer. (Disclosure: Oransky is a volunteer member of the board of directors of the PubPeer Foundation.) Many comments note issues with the references, while others pointed out repetitive language and “essentially identical” paragraph structure.
On November 19, the journal, published by Springer on behalf of the Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran, put the following editor’s note on the article: “The Editor-in-Chief has become of aware [sic] of concerns with this article. Action will be taken as appropriate following further investigation and discussion with the relevant stakeholders.”
The editor-in-chief of the journal is Mohammad Abdollahi, who is also the last author on the paper. Abdollahi has previously served as a council member for the Committee on Publication Ethics, according to COPE’s alumni website, and has 11 retractions. Abdollahi has not responded to our request for comment on the fake references.
One of the references links to a paper that was retracted this February from Life Sciences for including an incorrect primer sequence and data overlap with other papers. Seyed Mojtaba Daghighi and Abdollahi are common authors on the retracted study and the DARU paper.
The authors write in the acknowledgements section they used an AI tool to “assist in partial language editing,” but say they reviewed the content before it was published.
This is not the first time the Retraction Watch team has been cited in a fake reference. In a research integrity report commissioned by the Australian government last year, Oransky and cofounder Adam Marcus were credited with cowriting a chapter in a book with which they had no involvement.
The authors write in their article that post-publication peer review platforms like PubPeer can “blur the line between constructive feedback and destructive attack.”
Abdollahi has 86 papers flagged on PubPeer. First author Aristidis Tsatsakis has 18 articles with comments on the platform. Coauthor Michael Aschner, a professor of molecular pharmacology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, also has many flagged papers on PubPeer, as does coauthor Anca Oana Docea, an associate professor of toxicology at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Craiova in Romania.
Tsatsakis responded to our request for comment with one word: “Unsubscribe.”
Tsatsakis, who lists affiliations in Greece, Ecuador and Russia, has one retraction, of the paper “Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?” published in Toxicology Reports. Tsatsakis was the editor-in-chief of the journal when the article was published. Andrey A. Svistunov, vice rector at I. M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, was a coauthor on the retracted article as well as the new article critiquing PubPeer.
Study coauthor José L. Domingo, professor of toxicology and environmental health at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Spain, previously made headlines after he resigned as editor-in-chief of Food and Chemical Toxicology following an editorial he wrote calling for papers “on the potential toxic effects of COVID-19 vaccines.”
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