While reviewing a manuscript for the Journal of Organic Chemistry, Caroline Kervarc-Genre and her colleague, Thibault Cantat, researchers at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, noticed something unusual.
The nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra buried in the supplementary information had striking irregularities: The baseline was interrupted in some parts, and the noise was the same from one spectrum to the next. “Noise being inherently random, repeating noise is only possible if the spectra are altered [or] fake,” Kervarc-Genre told Retraction Watch.
Starting to suspect something was wrong, she and Cantat, examined other papers by the lead author. They discovered data appeared to have been edited in several of the author’s latest publications. “The fraud was not subtle,” Kervarc-Genre said.
She had never come across such blatant fraud, she said, and was unsure about what to do, so turned to PubPeer to report the findings. Others soon joined, uncovering more troubling patterns in the work.
In total, 43 papers have been flagged on PubPeer, all sharing a common author: Suman L. Jain, a scientist at the CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum in Dehradun. Published between 2011 and 2024, many of the articles show anomalous spectra, as well as identical noise patterns and missing product characterizations – meaning there is no way of knowing if experiments were done at all, Kervarc-Genre said. In December and January, 10 of the flagged papers, all in journals from the Royal Society of Chemistry, were retracted; seven more from the publisher have received expressions of concern, pending further investigation.
Kervarc-Genre said the issues in the papers were often “blatant”. In two, “Novel Organic‐Inorganic Hybrid Mesoporous Silica Supported Oxo‐Vanadium Schiff Base for Selective Oxidation of Alcohols,” published in Advanced Synthesis & Catalysis and “Thiourea dioxide promoted efficient organocatalytic one-pot synthesis of a library of novel heterocyclic compounds,” which appeared in Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry, the sleuths recognized spectra copied from the Spectral Database for Organic Compounds, a well-known repository in the field.
Responding to the PubPeer comments pointing out the copy-and-paste, Jain wrote she was “extremely sorry”, and said her institute didn’t have the right equipment to perform the experiments at the time. According to Jain, her students obtained the data from other institutes, and she was shown hard copies when the manuscript was being prepared. “These students are now settled in other countries and I have minimum contact information about them,” Jain wrote on PubPeer, adding she was attempting to contact them.
The paper in Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry was retracted in January, alongside nine others published in Royal Society of Chemistry journals. In the series of papers, the retraction notices cite duplications and anomalies in the spectra – such as peaks appearing manually added or removed – as well as significant gaps in the data. Some of the retraction notices specify author contributions, with some attributing responsibility for the experimental work to the first authors, often the students in the lab.
Another article, “Nickel oxide nanoparticles grafted on reduced graphene oxide (rGO/NiO) as efficient photocatalyst for reduction of nitroaromatics under visible light irradiation”, published in the Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology A: Chemistry, was corrected after a commenter on PubPeer noticed identical noise on the spectra published in the paper. “The authors feel extremely sorry as they have inadvertently made a mistake in data handling…”, the correction states, attributing the noise duplication to a possible “labeling mistake”.
In “Synergistic CdS@CeO2 nanocomposites: Harnessing Z-scheme electron transfer for enhanced photocatalytic CO2 conversion and aqueous Cr(VI) reduction,” which appears in the Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering, a PubPeer commenter pointed out peaks appeared to have been manually added onto the spectra, and unexpected blank spots in one of the graphs.
Jain acknowledged the irregularities, stating on PubPeer she agreed with the concerns and was trying to contact the student responsible for the experiments, who had left her group a year earlier. Then in August 2024, she wrote that she had submitted a correction to the editor, although none appears on the article page. In an email to Retraction Watch, a spokesperson for Elsevier, which publishes the journal, said they had not received any request for correction to the article by the authors. However, the publisher is investigating this paper, along with 13 others flagged on PubPeer, that Jain published in Elsevier journals.
A handful of Jain’s papers flagged on PubPeer were also co-authored by French chemists, Rabah Boukherroub and Sabine Szunerits, recently called out on For Better Science for alleged papermilling. Earlier in her career, Jain’s 2009 paper “An Efficient Synthesis of Poly(ethylene glycol)-Supported Iron(II) Porphyrin using a Click Reaction and its Application for the Catalytic Olefination of Aldehydes” was also retracted, after a reader discovered a reported reaction hadn’t happened, invalidating the paper’s hypothesis and conclusions.
In an email to Retraction Watch, Jain wrote “this is a most unfortunate situation for me,” and that she was “highly shocked” after receiving notifications on PubPeer and an email regarding an investigation by the Royal Society. of Chemistry. She called it “the most unfortunate part of my life” that the students who performed the experiments had left her group and could no longer be reached. During the manuscript submissions, she described having uploaded the supporting files that her students prepared, without realizing they had manipulated the data.
“I sincerely apologise and accept my mistake that I should check and re-verify the data before submission,” she wrote, adding that until reading the comments on PubPeer, she was “utterly unaware of this unethical act by the students.”
Jain said she felt “afraid to respond on PubPeer” but planned to resubmit each retracted article as a new publication with the raw data to preserve her integrity. She claimed to have already provided corrected results to some journals, adding that for the rest she would “re-perform the reactions… with the help of new students.” She continued:
… please believe me. I was completely unaware of these manipulations during the manuscript submission. I could never imagine that students whom I helped a lot during their PhD did this to me, and now, they are not even responding. I feel cheated by the dirty and manipulative students who, just for their selfish purpose, created this trouble for me. I am highly depressed and do not know how to come out of all that.
This situation is an eye-opener for me for the future. I will be extremely careful in data handling from now onwards.
We attempted to contact a handful of the students who once worked in Jain’s lab, and were listed as co-authors on the articles issued with retractions or expressions of concern. None have yet responded to our queries.
Along with another colleague, Cantat, one of the researchers who first spotted the abnormalities in Jain’s work, contacted editors at 11 journals to report the findings he and Kervarc-Genre had made. Only two replied: the European Journal of Organic Chemistry, which said it would “thoroughly investigate”, but has yet to take action, and the Royal Society of Chemistry, the publisher which issued the ten retractions in its journals earlier this year.
“We were extremely disappointed in the reaction of the editors and publishers, which was to ignore us, and the data manipulation,” Kervarc-Genre said. “We found it very infuriating that the reviewers and editors had accepted papers that contained some blatant fraud and had clearly not been looked at with enough care.”
The manuscript that first sparked their suspicion never made it into the Journal of Organic Chemistry after Cantat reported his concerns to the handling editor. Instead, a year later, it resurfaced in Molecular Catalysis, although Cantat said he had not had the time to review the published version.
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