‘Violated’: Engineering professor found her name on four papers she didn’t write

On a Friday in July, Laura Schaefer Googled herself to find her ORCID researcher ID for a paper submission. 

To her surprise, a paper popped up with her name in a journal she’d never published in. Her surprise quickly turned to concern – had someone copied one of her articles? 

As she searched the site where the work appeared, she found more articles with her name, covering subjects she had never written about and with co-authors she didn’t know. 

“[I] became angrier the more I found, and also started feeling really violated that someone had used my name and title to put forward something that wasn’t scientifically rigorous,” Schaefer, a professor of mechanical engineering at Rice University in Houston, said.

Schaefer found a total of four papers bearing her name, on topics far from her expertise such as agriculture and waste disposal. The articles appeared in the Journal of Robotics Spectrum, Journal of Machine and Computing and Journal of Computing and Natural Science, all titles belonging to a publisher in Kenya called AnaPub. None of the journals is indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science.

According to their website, AnaPub is a “globally active publisher” with a mission to provide opportunities for authors to “publish their high-quality articles on the world [sic] best platform.” In July, Schaefer wrote to Emmanuel Sikuku Ogutu, AnaPub’s managing editor, asking him to remove the four papers attributed to her and linked to her Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID). 

Ogutu apologised for incorrectly linking to her ID, but said his team had “successfully verified the authorship” of “Mr. Laura Schaefer,” who was “a past alumnus [sic] of Rice University.”

Schaefer promptly responded that she knew for a fact, as former department chair of Mechanical Engineering at Rice, there had never been another student with her name in the Mechanical Engineering Department or within the entire School of Engineering.

Lawyers for Rice also contacted a former student with a relatively similar name, Lauren Schaefer DiGloria, who confirmed she never authored any papers. 

In emails seen by Retraction Watch, Rice’s lawyers demanded AnaPub remove the publications immediately and threatened a lawsuit for fraud. In a response on July 29, Ogutu said AnaPub has given “Mr. Laura Schaefer” 60 days to verify their identity. Schaefer and her team at Rice have not heard from Ogutu or anyone at AnaPub since. AnaPub also did not respond to our requests for comment.

Arvind Atreya, Schaefer’s supposed co-author on two of the papers, is also listed as a faculty member at Rice. Atreya is in fact a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He confirmed he did not write the papers, either. 

The articles list email addresses for Atreya and Schaefer at Rice’s domain that bounced back when we attempted to contact them. Another address listed for Schaefer at “hotmail.com” didn’t bounce, but no one replied. 

Schaefer has her doubts whether other authors named on papers on AnaPub’s website are truly connected with the work. They are “all people from very well-respected institutions,” she said. All four papers remain on AnaPub’s website credited to Laura Schaefer.

We’ve previously covered other cases of forged authorship on papers that appeared to have been plagiarized. One of the papers, falsely attributed to Anca Turcu of the University of Central Florida, has been taken down, but the other, naming Steffen Barra of the University of Saarland in Germany, is still online.

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