Researchers apparently don’t need to be real to publish in scientific journals.
Take Nicholas Zafetti of Clemson University, in South Carolina, who has at least nine publications to his name. Or Giorgos Jimenez of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with 12 papers under his belt.
Both identities seem to be bogus, according to Alexander Magazinov, a scientific sleuth and software engineer based in Kazakhstan. They add to a short but growing list of ostensibly fictitious researchers who appear as coauthors on real papers.
We’ve written about Beatriz Ychussie of Roskilde University, in Denmark, whose work was marred by plagiarism and faked peer review; Dragan Rodriguez of Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, whose name adorned 15 articles on anything from cancer detection to “renewable energy systems optimization;” and Toshiyuki Bangi of Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore, who apparently was added to manuscripts by researchers looking to boost their “chances in the review process.”
Neither Zafetti nor Jimenez responded to interview requests sent to the email addresses listed on their papers.
Magazinov spotted Zafetti, as he did Rodriguez, while investigating a potential citation ring linked to an Iranian paper mill. Intriguingly, Zafetti had published almost exclusively with Chinese researchers. And his papers – appearing in titles from Springer Nature, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis – included an unusually high number of references to work by Noradin Ghadimi, a researcher at Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University, in Turkey. (Ghadimi did not respond to a request for comment.)
In October, Magazinov contacted Clemson University to share his concerns. In an email to Tracy Arwood, associate vice president and chief ethics and compliance officer at the institution, he wrote:
This case is similar to several others, where fictional identities of US-based researchers were used in scientific publications. …
The similarities with the “Rodriguez” case include complete absence of domestic collaboration (the coauthors are mostly Chinese, with one exception: a single paper signed by Charalampos Baniotopoulos from Birmingham, UK), as well as an unexpected abundance of citations to one specific person, Noradin Ghadimi.
Arwood promised to investigate. On November 6, she circled back:
We have completed our review. We are reaching out to the journal editors to share our findings and ask for any information they may have that is contrary to our findings. We will also ask that they take appropriate action if they agree with our findings.
Neither Arwood nor the university’s newsroom responded to our requests for comment.
The three affected publishers all told us they were looking into the concerns about Zafetti. An Elsevier spokesperson added that the company was investigating authorship changes in two of Zafetti’s papers “that were not approved by the Editors.”.
We also reached out to two of Zafetti’s (seemingly real) coauthors, Ziyu Wang of the University of Birmingham, in the U.K., and Yongtang Wu of Weifang University of Science and Technology, in China, but did not hear back.
Magazinov shared with us three other apparently fake identities he had stumbled on during his sleuthing: a “Benjamin Badami” of the University of Georgia, in Athens, Georgia; an “Achla Anderson” of Texas Tech University, in Lubbock; and a “Scott Mizzi” of Northeastern University, in Boston. They all published exclusively with international coauthors, mainly from China, and none appeared on the websites of the institutions with which they were allegedly affiliated.
As to Jimenez, SAGE Publications publicly called the bluff last year. In a pair of retraction notices, the publisher stated:
Following publication of the article, the Journal became aware that the identity of one of the authors, G Jimenez, cannot be confirmed at their listed institution. The authors were asked for an explanation of the involvement of an unauthorised third party and did not provide a response.
But that didn’t stop Jimenez’ work from being published elsewhere. And most of “his” papers remain in print – in titles published by Springer Nature, Elsevier, De Gruyter and others – as do those of Zafetti, Badami, Anderson, Mizzi and Rodriguez.
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Who can forget when the city of Clermont Ferrand was an author of a Hindawi paper (now retracted)?
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/wcmc/2022/8121193/
Or – to give credit where credit is due – Wiley, the actual publisher.
There’s also the case of Galadriel Mirkwood, the Afghan Hound of Polly Matzinger, who got himself a co-authorship on one of her papers.
While looking at Badami, I found another researcher with high citations (boasting about being top 2%) whose name is Razmjooy. There’s something veeeeery fishy with him and Ghadimi, it seems that they’re artifically inflating their citations by getting randomly cited in completely unrelated articles. For example, this paper : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0933365719301460,”Skin cancer diagnosis based on optimized convolutional neural network”, published in an Elsevier journal. In this paper, Badami is co-author, Razmjooy is cited 5 times and Ghadimi 4, none of the citations are either of no relation whatsoever to the subject in question (the funniest for me being “Studies have shown that the early detection of melanoma helps significantly to reduce the death rate of melanoma cancer” which is apparently cited from “A real-time mathematical computer method for potato
inspection using machine vision,”[sic]) or are appended to a sentence so vague that basically any paper would do (“Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is a part of Artificial Intelligence that can be used in different applications of image processing, like image segmentation and image classification” is followed by 7 citations of which 3 are papers where Razmjooy is one of the authors and 2 are papers where Ghadimi is the author). I’m sure there’s a lot more papers and a lot more researchers and fake names to uncover from that, given that some of Ghadimi’s articles accrue 400+ citations despite being very niche, but I’m on a laptop without a mouse so trying to uncover a pattern would be very unpractical (although very fun).
“In this paper, Badami is co-author, Razmjooy is cited 5 times and Ghadimi 4”
At least 10 citations are donated to Ghadimi, though most are concealed within “et al”.
What do they get out of this? Is it just to have the appearance of having someone on their paper from a reputable institution?
Both Ghadimi and Razmjooy boast about their high number of citations but they’re not the only ones. The Islamic Azad University, to which both Ghadimi and Razmjooy are affiliated, benefit from this scheme and proudly show all of the now inflated citation-based rankings on their Wikipedia page.
According to Ghadimi’s Scopus [1] he is cited 10,716 times by 3,395 documents. This means 3.1 times cited in average in each article, which is a very big number. Anything more than 2 can be an indication of artificial citations, while below bellow 2 is healthy. A practical way to study the systematic manipulation of citations is to count how many articles an individual is cited by (instead of the conventional way of measuring the number of citations or H-index). Do you agree?
1. https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=37661184600
Hard disagree.
Relevance and appropriateness of citations should be evaluated in peer review. Journals that fail on peer review should be named and shamed.
Today, we are failing on both points. However, it is absolutely not a reason to invent band aid in hope to cure terminal cancer.
Well, this (2023) year’s Highly Cited Researcher Yongbing Tang is currently getting 1 to 2 citations from works of a certain papermill. So if he is not already in the safe range, then he will soon reach it. And still, the amount of milled papers was very sufficient to prop him up.
I checked Yongbing Tang, where often, a certain part of an article which includes a certain number of citations (correct or not correct) may be used in other article. In such cases, those citations are used again and again and again. This wont necessarily means that the second article directly aimed to boost one’s citations, but just this is the way science works. This is the science of citation. This is the reason why those who write a content first direct the citations.
Back in old good times, a passage like, “Energy storage is important for the humankind (Tang, 2016),” was called “meaningless” or “boilerplate.” And referees weren’t particularly happy about such stuff.
Apparently, now it is called “the science of citation.” Or so we are told.
Tang and Ghadimi are cited in the articles belong to a third party. It is very difficult to take them responsible or blame them for all of their citations. They cannot monitor or influence who cite them. How may they react for the actions they are not responsible? is there any guild-line?
The author decides to cite (Tang, 2016) in the context above where he/she find appropriate. Regulating scientific community what to cite might be not desirable by researchers. What is your opinion?
Indeed, let us assume for a while that Yongbing Tang is just a random dude whom a bunch of shady actors decided to boost for reasons unknown. Here, “shady” is a fact: take one of them, M M Selim, and check his retractions, which are quite telling. Then look at Selim’s collaboration network and meet all the same people who cite Tang.
Now, is Tang’s “highly cited” status well-deserved? Obviously no: the original idea was that you would be cited more often because your work is more relevant than others’ work. Tang gets citations not because of that, but because for some magical reasons his works are picked as an illustration why batteries are important to the humankind. Are they indeed the best illustrations for the purpose? No way.
On a separate note, it is too hard to dismiss a distinct possibility that Tang uses some kind of citation market to boost his profile. Is Ivan Gusev aware that such phenomena exist?
The Ghadimi case is even easier. Painting him innocent with, for example, evidence as below, is just ridiculous. https://pubpeer.com/publications/0571C4ADC264203253A19B46A2E7A9. Authorship-for-sale cases are being discussed all over the place, in this blog among all the rest. It would be a surprise if Ivan Gusev is unaware of all that and can’t draw conclusions.
Now, Pierre Dubois says, “Regulating scientific community what to cite might be not desirable by researchers.” A referee asking an author to remove meaningless / boilerplate text, call it regulation or otherwise, is what has been there forever. Remove these hollow sentences, and the arbitrary citations are gone. On the other hand, citation vehicles have been largely adopted by the para(sitic)science, carefully cultivated all over MDPI and in a number of other journals, mostly from Elsevier. El Naschie is back, upscaled.
Finally: I might be wrong, but the above replies share some subtle commonalities in style with those from earlier threads: “Sarah Adams” here: https://retractionwatch.com/2023/07/11/editorial-board-member-dropped-from-journal-site-after-retraction-watch-undark-report-links-him-to-paper-mill/, “Fernando Alinso” here: https://retractionwatch.com/2023/07/19/journal-asks-scientist-to-step-down-from-editorial-board-after-sleuths-comments-linked-him-to-paper-mill/. What to make of it, it is up to the reader.
Regardless of the validity of authors like Nicholas Zafetti, Dragan Rodriguez, or Jimenez, they made relevant citations to people like Ghadimi. They are scientists in the similar field. It is natural that they cite each other in the research community. or no?
“They are scientists in the similar field.”
No. That’s the whole point of the article you’re replying to. They do not exist and therefore cannot be scientists, let alone in a similar field.
These are high quality articles published in high quality journals, peer-reviewed by critical reviewers. Maybe some scientists wish to publish under alternative names for some unknown reasons. Maybe they dont want to be interviewed. Shall we not call them scientist?
These are high quality articles published in high quality journals, peer-reviewed by critical reviewers.
Or alternatively, these are garbage papers published in garbage journals, not peer-reviewed at all, because this entire “research” field is just garbage and fiddle-faddle as far as the eye can see.
they made relevant citations to people like Ghadimi
No, “they” made nonsensical ludicrous citations to Ghadimi and his colleagues, not to illuminate a point but to drive up academic indices. If they are sockpuppets, it is fair to ask who are the actual authors of these template-driven bits of fluff.
The magic ratio comes from dividing the total citations by the number of articles that cite you indicating how many times you are cited, in average, in one article. Indeed if it is closer to 1, it is healthy. As it gets distance from 1 and goes higher than 2 it indeed gets suspicious. In case of Ghadimi, this number is 3.1, meaning he had been cited, at least 3 times, in every article that cites him. Receiving citations in bulk in a limited number of articles might not be serious for some, but when it is systematic and affect the magic ratio (total citations/total citing articles) it might need some attention.
Isnt there any mechanism by which once found the papers of these in which these people appear be taken down from the publisher websites?, I just checked a couple of the one mentioned and still appear as respected authors.
data sleuth uses fake name but a scientist cannot?
Dear Jimmy, care to elaborate on your point?
Dear Alexander, what do you think about those scientists who conceal or falsify their affiliations in published papers?
As you see finally retracted:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352710220337761
Publisher ensures that affiliation and names must be real. Great job . Thank you Alexander for finding and reporting this issue.
a scientist can publish under pen name.
And then a scientist can have the paper retracted when the editors discover that they were lied to.
A pen name is not necessarily deceptive, and there are numerous legitimate reasons for choosing to publish that way.
To publish that way, yes, but then the reader should be informed.
You should admit that science community is a circle. Reaserchers know Tang and Ghadimi more likely to cite their papers. Just like without any relationship you can’t publish articles in Nature or Science. Can you？
Researchers know Ghadimi so they’ll cite him 27 times in a single article. Makes total sense. Honestly you could find better arguments to sock puppet with.
Would it be terribly wrong if I made up a whole sock-drawer of sock-puppet names, to argue that there’s nothing wrong about using sock-puppetry to pimp one’s citation statistics?
Thank you for the great work. It can be learned that if US-based researchers work with Chinese researchers and cite Iranians they are suspicious to be made-up.
This is an outstanding work, and when researchers from different countries jointly publish a paper, it should be given sufficient attention, especially since they have no prior experience of joint research.
Meet Rolando Simoes from Northwestern, another US-based Ghadimi-citer with almost all collaborators from China.
https://app.dimensions.ai/discover/publication?search_mode=content&and_facet_researcher=ur.015710440440.08
First spotted by Apterokarpos gardneri, with Smut Clyde picking up the investigation.
Meet also Ashk Fars, who between 2021 and 2023 moved from Baku to Yerevan (screw the political and security considerations of our consensus world!) and started to cite Oveis Abedinia, an associate of Ghadimi.
https://app.dimensions.ai/discover/publication?search_mode=content&and_facet_researcher=ur.010044512222.46
Could you please share an official Scholar, WOS, or Scopus link? I am not familiar with dimensions.ai. It is not functional. Thanks.
https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=57201481832
https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=57359685200
Thanks. Please kindly note that dimensions.ai integrates all cross-references having a DOI weather preprints or actual journal articles. If one publishes one article and a few preprints to that article, dimensions.ai sum them up and reports that author has multiple publications. Yet, Scopus only report the Scopus-based article. The preprint versions are not counted separately. About the Scopus links of the above persons, these two, considering the research profile, could possibly be two grad students at the US-based who were visiting students at a Chinese University who are now perusing career in industry.
Regarding “Simoes,” it takes minutes to check with Northwestern, if they know about that person. I leave this as an exercise to an interested reader.
Per the last publication, “Ashk Fars” is affiliated with “Electrical Engineering Department, Arian Company, Yerevan, Armenia.” If this company has research capacities, shouldn’t it be visible online? And if it is, we are left with two options: either a jewelry chain, or a hostel (a car retailer has been shut down long ago).
So one relocates to Yerevan from Baku in 2021 or 2022 (!!) to work for “Electrical Engineering Department” (!!) of either a jewelry chain, or a hostel (!!), familiarizes himself with seminal (bwa-cha-cha) works of one Oveis Abedinia (!!), a close associate of Noradin Ghadimi (!!), and starts to plant citations to Abedinia in collaborations with Chinese from Qingdao, Wuhan and Zhengzhou (!!).
Let me call BS on this story, from the beginning to the end.
I work in China and was curious about this article. Zafetti is the last author (apparently the corresponding author?) on nearly all of the papers under his name. Almost all of them are with different sets of people at different locations – Nanjing, Qingdao, Weihai and the University of Birmingham among them. Unlikely to be either a student or a professor who was visiting China and traveling around so much during COVID-19 lockdowns. All the papers are from 2020-2023, and from a scan of the titles appear to use computer algorithms for widely varying purposes.
I know there is tremendous pressure on researchers in China to publish in SCI journals, and it is probably easier to do that if you have a foreign name on the author list – perhaps that is part of the motivation for this? Or are these just faked papers altogether?
All this field of “nature-inspired” algorithms is nothing more than a fiddle-faddle as of late, though it hasn’t been entirely rigorous even in the beginning. So there is little doubt that the papers in question are fake.
It is very likely that they were simply sold to various Chinese groups by someone with connection to Ghadimi.
Why use a fake identity? First, a pseudo-Western “author” indeed boosts the chances that the paper is accepted. Second, such an avatar subsequently can be used as an “independent” reviewer.
Thanks for clarifying. I looked closer at the University of Birmingham paper – Zafetti is listed as a corresponding author (with a gmail address) and Wang Ziyu is first author/corresponding author with a 163.com email. That name is supposed to be at the University of Birmingham, but is not listed on their website. Searching for it in general doesn’t work – too many people with the same name.
Another researcher who is a well-known name there is listed, but not as a corresponding author. Perhaps he doesn’t even know about the paper. Which leaves the question of who actually gets any credit for it if 2 of the 4 authors are not real and one is not aware of it. Ghadimi? There is one more Chinese name, also supposedly at Birmingham.
People at real institutions in China and elsewhere should have email addresses with those domains, so perhaps publishers should be red flagging non-official email addresses and double-checking people who don’t have them. Even hospitals I would think would have their own. I just looked at a paper I edited for a doctor here and even though she is at a large university-associated hospital, the email given is 126.com. Certainly she could provide an official email if that was required.
Yes, in most cases people can have an institution-provided mail, but they cannot be forced to use them. In many cases (especially, doctorate students) the personal mailboxes on the public services are more stable than their current affiliations. As for Chinese researchers, approx. half of them have used 126, 163, qq, or similar addresses – I just looked at my own statistics.
Pen names are probably as old as science. The most obvious one is “student” as in “students -t test”. Student was the pen name of WS Gosset (1876-1937), a mathematician who’s day job was in a brewery.
True – but pen names (“Clare Francis”, for example) are very different from made-up authors. For example, should I expect that the Rolling Stones founder faked his death and is now interested in scientific retractions? In these cases, people aren’t providing these fake names for privacy, but rather are doing them for fraud.
Journals unfortunately wont take any actions and there is currently no clear regulation on such activities.
Retraction Note: Net-Zero Energy Building Optimization Based on Simulation by African Vulture Optimization Algorithm: Cases of Italy
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42835-024-01960-2
Apparently submitted by “Nicholas Zafetti”, who added the other three “co-authors” after the manuscript was accepted.