Earlier this year, Klaus Heese, a professor at Hanyang University in Seoul, noticed a review article he’d worked on had finally been published. But his name wasn’t on it, nor was that of another scientist who had also been involved in preparing the manuscript.
Instead, two professors Heese didn’t know had been added as authors on the paper, which appeared in June in Natural Product Communications.
Alarmed, Heese emailed Sivakamavalli Jeyachandran, an associate professor at Saveetha University in Chennai, India, and one of the corresponding authors of the article. Heese had received an invitation in 2023 to help with the review from a former collaborator, Arulmani Manavalan, who was working with Jeyachandran and her student Hethesh Chellapandian.
Retraction Watch readers may be familiar with Saveetha University, also known as SIMATS, as well as Jeyandran and Chellapandian. We have written repeatedly about the institution’s attempts at gaming its publication metrics to boost its rankings. Following one of our investigations in Science, a Springer Nature journal began retracting AI-written commentaries by the dozens, many of which were coauthored by Chellapandian and Jeyachandran, as we reported at the time.
According to Heese, he and his coauthors submitted their manuscript to two journals, Biomimetics and Heliyon, without success. Both versions of the paper listed Heese as a corresponding author. One stated he contributed to “writing, editing, formatting, reviewing, [and] language correction,” while crediting Manavalan with “review and editing” and Jeyachandran and Chellapandian with “Conceptualization and [writing] sections of the manuscript.”
A later version of the manuscript with the filename “Jeyachandran et al. 2024-May-19” stated Jeyachandran and Manavalan “contributed to conception and design of the study,” Chellapandian “wrote sections of the manuscript,” Manavalan contributed “writing and editing” and Heese “writing, editing, formatting, reviewing, language correction.”
In correspondence he shared with us, Heese suggested trying a new journal after the two rejections. But Jeyachandran was slow to react, and in May 2024 she stopped responding altogether. Heese assumed Jeyachandran had abandoned the project.
More than a year later, Heese stumbled on the paper in Natural Product Communications. It mentioned neither his nor Manavalan’s contributions, but stated instead the review had been conceptualized by Chellapandian and Kiyun Park, a research professor at Chonnam National University in Yeosu, South Korea. According to the new authorship-contribution statement, Park also contributed to “formal analysis,” “data curation” and “writing” of the paper.
A new corresponding author, Ihn-Sil Kwak, a nationally renowned professor at Chonnam and an editor of Ocean Science Journal and the Journal of Ecology and Environment, contributed to “validation,” “resources,” “supervision” and “project administration and funding acquisition,” the paper stated.
The funding sources also changed with each iteration of the manuscript. The version submitted to Biomimetics stated the work had no external funding, the one sent to Heliyon declared support from a National Research Foundation of Korea grant, whereas the paper in Natural Product Communications declared funding from another National Research Foundation of Korea grant.
When Heese emailed Jeyachandran about the published paper in October of this year, asking for comments “before I take further action,” the Indian researcher promptly wrote back.
“We sought your assistance after facing rejection from several journals due to a lack of direct connections,” Jeyachandran told Heese on October 7. ”As a result, I decided to proceed with publication alongside my previous research group. The manuscript was written by one of my students, and my postdoctoral mentor, Prof. Kwak, kindly covered the APC charges after a significant delay.” (Natural Product Communications charges authors US$3,000 to publish.)
The next day, however, Jeyachandran expressed contrition. “I unfortunately overlooked including your name in the author list,” she apologized. “This was a genuine mistake on my part and in no way reflects the value of your contribution to the manuscript.”
She added: “I truly appreciate the time, insights, and support you provided during the conceptualization and development of the review. Your input was instrumental in shaping the manuscript, and it was never my intention to disregard your role or effort.”
Heese didn’t buy it. In an email sent October 9 to a large number of journals and organizations – including Natural Product Communications, Saveetha and Retraction Watch – he laid out what had happened and attached a draft version of the manuscript showing he had revised the text throughout and reformatted the reference list. Manavalan had “extensively revised and prepared” the figures, Heese wrote.
“The file ‘Jeyachandran et al. 2024-May-19’ is nearly identical — word for word, including references, tables and figures — to the paper now published,” Heese wrote.
He also pointed to Jeyachandran’s two Google Scholar profiles, one of which excluded her many retractions, and urged “other journals” to “scrutinize publications by” Jeyachandran and Chellapandian.
“I would like to mention that I am not requesting to be added as an author to the published paper. Rather, I recommend that Natural Product Communications retracts this article due to ethical violations,” Heese concluded his email.
In an email to us, Jeyachandran changed her explanation once again. “It became evident during the course of the project that Prof. Klaus [Heese]’s contribution was minimal, both intellectually and operationally and he has not done extensive work” on the manuscript, she told us.
“In light of the lack of significant scholarly contribution, and in adherence to standard authorship ethics, the decision was taken to omit Prof. Heese from the final publication,” she added. ”The authors (Prof. Kiyun Park and Prof. Ihn-sil Kwak) from South Korea have supervised this research project and provided research support and contribution.”
Her new Korean coauthors did not respond to requests for comment. But in an email from October 17 addressed to Heese and copying Jeyachandran, Chellapandian and Kwak, Park, a member of Kwak’s lab, said he “had absolutely no prior knowledge of the matter you described.”
”Our research group takes this issue with the utmost seriousness,” Park added. ”Professor Sivakamavalli must regard this situation as an opportunity for sincere reflection and correction of his behavior. Should there be no substantial improvement, our team will immediately suspend from any ongoing or future collaboration with Sivakamavalli.”
Laura West, corporate communications and public affairs manager at Sage, which publishes Natural Product Communications, told us the “case is currently under investigation. While the investigation is underway, we don’t have any further information to share.”
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It’s unfortunate that researchers continue to indulge in such unethical practices that end up showing their institution and importantly the country in a bad light. Scientific integrity is the need of the hour and sensitization of researchers on need to do ethical and quality research with strong penalities for misconduct is a must. By the way, Jeyachandran has been mispelt as Jeyandran at one place in the article, not that it matters a lot though. 😃