The senior author of a book chapter in the 2020 volume that Springer Nature has retracted for plagiarism has blamed a former grad student from Cuba in the affair — a charge she dismisses as “crazy.”
The chapter was retracted nearly 10 months after readers pointed out passages that had appeared to have been churned out by the fake paper generator Mathgen.
Titled “Ethnic Characterization in Amalgamated People for Airport Security Using a Repository of Images and Pigeon-Inspired Optimization (PIO) Algorithm for the Improvement of Their Results,” the material was ostensibly written by a group at Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez led by Alberto Ochoa-Zezzatti. It appeared in “Applications of Hybrid Metaheuristic Algorithms for Image Processing,” which belongs to the 982-volume (and counting) Studies in Computational Intelligence series.
Last December, commenters on PubPeer including Guillaume Cabanac and Cyril Labbé — who will be familiar to readers of this blog for their exposure of nonsensical papers with “tortured” language showing signs of plagiarism — pointed out at least one problematic passage in the chapter:
Every face indeed! (For those wondering what’s going on here, “every face” is what happens when “everybody” gets waterboarded by a nonsense generator.) (Update, 1550 UTC, 10/21/21: Alexander Magazinov, who tells us he is “Elaphoglossum Callifolium” on PubPeer, and who said he contacted Springer Nature about the issues last December, says that “‘Face’ might have been inserted on purpose, because the chapter was supposed to be about *face* recognition.”)
As it happens, that section wasn’t the only problematic passage in the article. According to the retraction notice:
The editors have retracted this chapter because it significantly overlaps with a previously published article by Duan and Qiao [1] and a previously published conference paper by Cruz-Álvarez et al. [2]. Additionally, a small section of the chapter appears to be generated by computer software, potentially Mathgen. The editors therefore no longer have confidence in the validity of this chapter.
The authors have not responded to correspondence regarding this retraction notice.
[1] Duan, H. and Qiao, P. (2014), “Pigeon-inspired optimization: a new swarm intelligence optimizer for air robot path planning”, International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics, Vol. 7 No. 1, pp. 24-37. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJICC-02-2014-0005
[2] Cruz-Álvarez V.R., Montes-Gonzalez F., Ochoa A., Palacios-Leyva R.E. (2012) Distribution and Selection of Colors on a Diorama to Represent Social Issues Using Cultural Algorithms and Graph Coloring. In: Omatu S., De Paz Santana J., González S., Molina J., Bernardos A., Rodríguez J. (eds) Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence. Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing, vol 151. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28765-7_8
The retracted chapter and book have been updated with the changes.
Ochoa responded to a request for comment with a lengthy email in which he blamed the problems with the chapter on a master’s student from Cuba named Claudia Martinez:
This rectrated chapter is original, but due to the improper use of an equation and not properly referencing the proposed metaheuristic and design of experiments explained to her from a previous Master student all this happened.
I assume my responsibility for not reviewing in detail, the work of a Master student in my charge, but it was impossible to review so many things at the same time ok. The Master’s student left the school, and that is why she was removed from the chapter, if you check in my other publications, when the student is in charge of the research, no matter if it is an Engineering, Master’s or PhD student, her name comes first.
Ochoa added that:
We did not agree in the retracted because we assumed that we could reach an explanatory note of what happened, even if you can observe it does not say plagiarism, because we only omitted a reference of the metaheuristic, and did not consider the design of experiments of a student in my previous charge, the equation was made by the student and we assumed that it was adequate for the level of mathematics that she used to say she brought from Cuba ok. The Master’s student always told me that she had won a Math Olympiad in Cuba, I did not distrust her equations because I assumed they were correct. I added and translated to English the letter of dishonesty from Master’s student Claudia Martinez.
Martinez, who responded to our request for comment with “están locos,” told us:
I started my master’s degree and he was given him as a tutor later I did not want to continue studying and I returned to my country I do not know what plagiarism they are talking about and why this man continues to bother me …
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>> For those wondering what’s going on here, “every face” is what happens when “everybody” gets waterboarded by a nonsense generator.
Nope. Mathgen’s phrase is “Every student is aware…”. “Face” might have been inserted on purpose, because the chapter was supposed to be about *face* recognition.
>> This rectrated chapter is original
Actually, there’s one and only answer to such BS, “release source code or didn’t happen.” Just like raw data in biomed. When will we understand that?
>> we could reach an explanatory note of what happened
Facepalm. Just facepalm.
“It was [NAME] who” is another tell, especially when it occurs repeatedly in a paragraph, as here. I’ve seen a few different nonsense generators that use that or something similar, name-dropping at random.
But even without picking out individual tells, the paragraph is obviously nonsense. Clearly, no one read it closely before publication.
Honestly even the explanations given by said authors seem like they came out of sci/mathgen. Nothing is clear beyond the fact that this is junk that should’ve never been published.
The volume editor(s), the series editor(s), and the publisher’s copyeditor must have been comatose during the compilation and production of the volume.
Side note (suggested by another reader):
Perhaps the name of the master student could have been omitted?
Thanks for the comment. While we considered whether we would leave out her name if we could not contact her, we were able to include her forceful denial. Leaving it as some version of “a grad student we will not name,” which would also have meant leaving out the circumstances of her departure, would have left all of Ochoa’s former grad students under suspicion.
The author wants to blame an ex-student who is not even an author on the bolus of bafflegab he published. All the author’s excuses are arrant nonsense. I don’t see the reason to publish the defamatory part of his excuses – it is hardly fair on the ex-student, even if you have given her an opportunity to defend herself.
“I do not know what plagiarism they are talking about and why this man continues to bother me”
It sounds as if the student left the university to escape from the tutor. Now he is stalking her, and RetractionWatch is facilitating him.
Also, any advisor should be taking responsibility for a Masters’s student or any student that is publishing anything with their name on it. We are students that are relying on the assistance of our advisors to advise us on making the correct decisions. Regardless of whether or not the Master’s student wrote it, the advisor should be checking and reading the work and triple-checking equations, figures, graphs, and tables. While there is a responsibility you take as a graduate student to create your own work, the advisor even admits himself to be careless if this is even the correct story in the first place.
>> “you can observe it does not say plagiarism”.
It’s clear from the retraction notice that “significant overlaps with a previously published article” occurred. A quick check shows that figures 2, 3 and 4 in the retracted chapter were just copy/paste from the Duan & Qiao IJICC article (2014). Same remark for equations (1), (2), (3), (4) and (5). And same remark for the implementation of the PIO procedure (the only difference is that the retracted chapter includes many typos in this section, making the used algorithm completely unintelligible). However, maybe the essential reference to the IJICC article was omitted by accident. Yes, why not…
>> “it was impossible to review so many things at the same time”
Well, it takes less than 5 seconds to realize that equation (8) is nonsensical. In that respect, I agree with the above comment by Akhlesh.
>> I added […] the letter of dishonesty from Master’s student.
Sincerely, it is equally dishonest to charge a student who is not even a co-author of the chapter.
A quick check on google scholar shows 477 publications by Ochoa, only 35 of which have more that 10 citations. The majority have none. Draw your own conclusions about the MOA in this lab…
In a recent interview available on YouTube, the reporter mentions at 2’12” that Carlos Ochoa has “750+ scientific publications in 17 languages”, and at 15’08”, Alberto Ochoa emphasizes that he wrote “1200 publications”. All this seems a bit hyperbolic.
The interview is here:
I mean, someone needs to occupy lower levels of food chains in citation farms?
If someone wrote a paper they should be an author. “But they left the institution” is not adequate (see COPE guidelines). If someone did not write a paper, it is the depths of dishonesty to blame them for its contents.
I got stuck just trying to comprehend the title, but maybe that is because it is not my area of expertise: “Ethnic Characterization in Amalgamated People for Airport Security Using a Repository of Images and Pigeon-Inspired Optimization (PIO) Algorithm for the Improvement of Their Results,”
One wonders why airport security wants to ethnically characterize people.
It certainly looks like nobody at Springer Verlag read the offending excerpt before publication.
If they didn’t read this, i wonder what else they aren’t reading in what they publish, and how much other nonsense -less obvious than the above example- is getting published.