Learning a paper with your name on it has been published is typically something to celebrate. But for one climate scientist, a recent notification was the first he learned the manuscript even existed.
So instead of rejoicing, Jan Cermak, a researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, was busy writing to the journal Chemosphere about a paper he’d been credited with but never seen.
The paper, on meteorologic influences on air pollution in India, has been retracted after it became clear that a visiting fellow included Cermak as a coauthor without his permission.
According to the August 13 retraction notice, lead author Susanta Mahato provided an incorrect email address for both Cermak and another coauthor, P.K. Joshi, when submitting the paper to Chemosphere, although Joshi consented to being listed on the paper.
Cermak, head of the Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research Atmospheric Trace Gases and Remote Sensing (IMKASF), told Retraction Watch he discovered he was an author on the April 9 article when the corresponding author emailed him about it the day after it was published.
Last year, Chemosphere was delisted from Clarivate’s Web of Science after more than 60 papers received expressions of concern for authorship practices and undisclosed conflicts of interest. In the last 12 months, the journal has had 38 retractions.
The notice states Mahato provided the journal an “email to Professor Cermak making him aware of a manuscript that was in preparation,” which Cermak told us he never received.
Mahato, an assistant professor at Dr. Harisingh Gour University in Sagar, India, was a visiting fellow at IMKASF in 2024. The retraction notice stated Mahato also provided documentation “regarding a visit to Professor Cermak’ss (sic) lab from May to July 2024.” Cermak says he remembers Mahato visiting but didn’t answer our questions clarifying how much the two interacted during that time.
Neither Joshi nor Mahato responded to our multiple email requests for comment, nor did the third author, Sonali Kundu.
False authorship isn’t a new trend. In a similar case earlier this year, an author who discovered his name on a paper he didn’t write said he felt “professionally violated.” In other instances, authors have had mixed results in getting the papers removed.
Journals and publishers have long sought the best ways to validate coauthors’ identity. Proposed solutions have ranged from thorough communication between authors and journals to validating affiliation through email address.
Cermak contacted Chemosphere the same day he learned about the paper to request his name be removed from the paper. But a spokesperson for Elsevier, the journal’s publisher, told us in accordance with its policies, “author names are not removed from published articles.”
Another of Mahato’s papers received a correction in May from Springer Nature’s Environment, Development and Sustainability to replace the affiliation listed — Karlsruhe Institute of Technology — with the Special Center for Disaster Research at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
In a similar instance earlier this year, a visiting scholar at a lab funded by the United States Department of Agriculture falsely listed his affiliation with the organization and lost three papers as a result.
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