Springer Nature has removed two studies that were published in its journal Cluster Computing and included a co-author who didn’t know that the papers existed until December 2020, years after they were published.
The move follows reporting by Retraction Watch last week about the papers, which listed David Cox, the IBM Director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, as a co-author.
The studies–“A FCM cluster: cloud networking model for intelligent transportation in the city of Macau,” and “Mobile network intrusion detection for IoT system based on transfer learning algorithm,” disappeared from the publisher’s website on January 29th, without any retraction notices.
A spokesperson for Springer Nature told Retraction Watch:
We have investigated these two papers and can confirm that they are being retracted. We are committed to ensuring the integrity of the publication record and would like to stress that we do not consider the matter closed – further investigations are ongoing.
Cox first discovered the articles on dblp.org, a bibliography website for computer scientists. That same day, December 10th, 2020, he sent an email to an editor and social media manager at Springer Nature and tweeted about his frustrations.
Daming Li, the corresponding author on the two studies, first told Retraction Watch that the “two papers are being withdrawn” on January 19th. On January 28th, two days after the Retraction Watch story was published, Cox said, in a tweet, that the publisher wanted to post an erratum rather than retract them:
A day later, the papers were removed. Cox previously told us, in an email:
I thought I was going to need to get a lawyer to get them to remove those papers.
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Regarding the initial suggestion by Springer Nature to post an erratum to resolve an ethics violation, I agree with Dr. Cox that this is outrageous. But, I would like to highlight this also not the first such case in their catalog. They wish to cover up these issues with minimal effort. They don’t care about investigating or actually correcting the record.
For example, in 2017, I contacted the deputy editor of the pay-to-play journal Scientific Reports, well known on RW, but let me remind of the most egregious case in my memory: http://retractionwatch.com/2017/10/10/board-member-resigns-journal-handling-paper-accused-plagiarism/
I pointed out to him the following (quoted below) regarding the junk paper http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep40147 (I say this is junk based on my expertise and decades of experience in fluid mechanics but my communication with Sci. Rep. focused on straightforward facts that do no require any advanced training):
“First, I noted that it has 3 authors Ilyas Khan, Nehad Ali Shah & L. C. C. Dennis.
Second, I noted that the author contributions state that “I.K. formulated the problem N.A.S. solved the problem and prepared the figures. I.K. and N.A.S. wrote the main manuscript text. Both authors reviewed the manuscript.” Specifically, no contributions from L.C.C.D. are stated.
Third, the appendix (supplementary information) lists only 2 authors: Ilyas Khan, Nehad Ali Shah.
This appears to be a clearcut case of guest authorship in which, I presume, L.C.C.D. was added at a later stage after the paper was accepted. This is unethical. It breaches the guarantees made by the authors to Springer Nature in the author agreement. It is against COPE guidelines.”
After getting the run-around for a bit, they issued an erratum (you can see it at the link above to the paper) to say that it’s “no biggie”. The hilarious part is they attributed “numerical simulations” to the guest author in the revised credit statement. There are no numerical simulations in this junk “scientific report”. It is all pen-and-paper math and some plots of said results. The even bigger irony is that, at the bottom of the paper (link to section: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep40147#Sec13) where it tells the reader “how to cite”, it still doesn’t list the third (guest) author! This is further evidence that there was an illegitimate authorship manipulation so late in the publishing process that Springer Nature didn’t even manage to update all the metadata on the article. As Dr. Cox has highlighted in his tweets, folks in some parts of the world use these so-called “esteemed Springer Nature paper authorship”s for advancement in their careers, and I surmise that they trade authorships unethically towards this end.
Thus, I strongly agree with Dr. Cox’s tweet about the “race-to-the-bottom Springer brand”. And, I’ve provide another example of how they’re leading the way. This is my vignette about bringing up authorship irregularities to Springer Nature…
The papers “disappeared from the publisher’s website on January 29th, without any retraction notices.”
I would expect better than this from Springer Nature. They are not some startup unfamiliar with COPE guidelines.
At some point the story of fraud in the scientific literature stops being about the unethical behavior of authors and starts being about the unethical behavior of editors.