Publisher retracts nearly two dozen articles, blocks nearly three dozen more, from alias-employing author who plagiarized

IOP Publishing has retracted nearly two dozen conference proceedings which had been cribbed from other articles, translated into English and festooned with citations to the authors’ own work. 

According to the publisher, 12 of the 29 authors on the papers come from the same institution, Universidad de la Costa, in Barranquilla, Colombia. IOP says the institution is investigating. 

The first author on most of the papers is Jesus Silva, who appears to be affiliated with the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, in Lima, Peru — and has now joined our leaderboard with 23 retractions. For some, the first author is Amelec Viloria, of Universidad de la Costa. 

Except, according to IOP Publishing, Silva and Viloria are the same person, using an alias on some of the articles. 

Rachael Harper, IOP Publishing’s head of marketing communications, said the company heard from an aggrieved author on July 21, who complained that their work had been stolen, and quickly identified many more problematic papers: 

[T]he articles were retracted by IOP Publishing following clear evidence of plagiarism and citation manipulation.  In all cases, the work was originally published in Spanish and was translated and published without permission or acknowledgement to the original authors. Multiple new citations were also added to the articles post-translation, many of which were to the new author’s own work.

Harper continued:

We’re constantly evaluating our processes for conference proceedings as new ways to manipulate the system are revealed. We have high standards and expectations of our conference organisers and we are committed to stopping misconduct by taking both preventative and reactive measures.

Harper said “Amelec Jesus Viloria Silva” admitted to plagiarizing in 23 articles in two IOP journals — Materials Science and Engineering and the Journal of Physics: Conference Series. The publisher also intercepted another 35 papers from the authors — in some combination — that were in production but had yet to appear. 

Here’s the notice for one of the now-retracted papers, “Analysis of air quality data in the city of Bogotá through clustering techniques,” from Materials Science and Engineering, in April 2020:

This article, and others within this volume, has been retracted by IOP Publishing following clear evidence of plagiarism and citation manipulation.

This work was originally published in Spanish (1) and has been translated and published without permission or acknowledgement to the original authors. IOP Publishing Limited has discovered other papers within this volume that have been subjected to the same treatment. This is scientific misconduct.

Misconduct investigations are ongoing at the author’s institutions. IOP Publishing Limited will update this notice if required once those investigations have concluded.

IOP Publishing Limited request any citations to this article be redirected to the original work (1).

Anyone with any information regarding these papers is requested to contact [email protected].

We emailed Silva/Viloria for comment but have not heard back.

Please see an update on this post.

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