I am a research ethicist and often get asked by my university to investigate when potential concerns are raised about our staff or students. One example involved the recent case of the alleged paper mill and self-citation activities by Hitler Louis and Innocent Benjamin. The matter raised significant questions about who within the research community has the responsibility to act when concerns like this are raised.
Regular readers of Retraction Watch know that detecting alleged research misconduct is a haphazard affair. Frequently a university will find out about concerns after being notified by research integrity sleuths writing under pseudonyms. In this case, “Cisticola Tinniens” informed us that one of our current MSc students (Benjamin) had an unusually high number of publications for his early career stage, with some highlighted on the PubPeer website as potentially problematic.
The first thing we did was to check to see whether our university was named in any of these papers, as clearly institutions do have a responsibility for research attributed to our researchers or students. We found only one of the suspect papers named us directly, and since the work definitely had not occurred at our institution, it was relatively easy to get this affiliation corrected almost immediately.
But what about all the other problematic papers with no direct link to our university? It was difficult to know what more could be done beyond telling Cisticola Tinniens to contact the journals. Although Benjamin was now one of our students, what right did we have to interfere with supposedly peer-reviewed papers published by an expert academic journal prior to the individual arriving to study with us?
We hoped this would be the end of the case, but were surprised to receive yet more correspondence about a year or so later, well after the end of the student’s course. At this point, many of the problematic papers had been investigated and retracted. Yet Cisticola Tinniens and others on PubPeer seemed to think we should take further action.
We disagreed. Researchers move frequently between institutions, so if work cannot be directly linked back to a specific institution, what right does that institution have to take further action? Realistically there is little more a university can do except maybe revoke degrees, but this would be very difficult to justify if there is no obvious link between retractions and the work required for the degree itself.
Frustratingly, the increasing sophistication of generative AI, pressures created by the academic publish-or-perish culture, and the opportunity for financial profit make it increasingly easy for individuals to undermine the reliability of the research record. This is and should concern all of us but, as in this case, the responsibility for correcting the research record is shared.
If concerns are raised about the content of research papers, the journal editors who approved such papers for publication are the people best placed (and supposedly with the specific subject matter expertise) to investigate concerns. This is especially so due to an increasing trend for legitimate academic disagreements to be turned into research misconduct complaints, especially when there are strong differences of opinion. As an institution, we can pass on concerns as we did here, but the responsibility for making the difficult judgment as to the difference between a legitimate academic disagreement and research misconduct must sit with the relevant expert community represented by the journal editor.
As an academic, I care deeply about the accuracy of the research record and am frustrated by how easily some people are able to take advantage of the system without any apparent consequences. But while universities as employers and awarders of degrees do have a certain amount of power, they cannot be expected to take on the (sometimes legal) risk and burden of sanctioning all failures across the research process.
If journals in particular want to make large profits by representing and controlling the research literature, they also need to take responsibility to stop situations like this from occurring in the first place. If they prove to be ineffective at preventing fraudulent publications or managing effective peer review, it is yet more evidence that the research publication system is broken and needs replacing with alternative ways of judging and communicating research.
Simon Kolstoe is an associate professor of bioethics at the University of Portsmouth, U.K. His research focuses on the role of ethics committees and governance processes in promoting research integrity.
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