Zulfiqar Habib, dean of computer science at COMSATS University Islamabad, in Pakistan, was appalled when he discovered part of a former PhD student’s dissertation had been published in a scientific journal.
After all, the former student, Kurshid Asghar, had been dead for more than a year by the time the manuscript was submitted to Security and Communication Networks, a Hindawi title. And Habib knew none of Asghar’s coauthors had contributed to the research, which Habib had supervised.
“It was both shocking and unbelievable,” he told Retraction Watch.
Last year, a professor and dean at a university in Spain suddenly began publishing papers with a multitude of far-flung researchers. His coauthors, until then exclusively national, now came from places like India, China, Nepal, South Korea, Georgia, Austria, and the United States.
How these unlikely collaborations began is not entirely clear. But a six-month Retraction Watch investigation, part of which is published here as a companion piece to a longer article appearing today in Science, suggests an unsavory possibility: The dean, Dionisio Lorenzo Lorenzo Villegas of the faculty of health sciences at Universidad Fernando Pessoa-Canarias, in Las Palmas, bought his way onto the papers – something he partly admits.
At least six of the seven journal articles Lorenzo published last year had been previously advertised for sale by the Indian paper mill iTrilon. Based in Chennai, this underhand operation sells authorship of “readymade” publications to scientists “struggling to write and publish papers in PubMed and Scopus-Indexed Journals,” according to a WhatsApp message its scientific director, Sarath Ranganathan, sent to prospective clients last summer. Ranganathan also claimed to have connections at journals that allowed him, in many cases, to guarantee acceptance of the manuscripts he would send their way.
New editorial policies at an MDPI title accused of publishing “sadistic, cruel, and unnecessary” animal studies are missing the mark, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a U.S-based advocacy group.
A former reviewer for the journal, and one of the more than 1,100 signatories of a recent PCRM boycott letter, said she resigned from the post after realizing Nutrients published research that was “sadistic, cruel, and unnecessary,” according to a press release from November.
Email correspondence made public here for the first time shows Nutrients continues to reject the group’s concerns. In one message from 2022, it told PCRM that 21 papers flagged as problematic “contained ethics statements that are in accordance with the journal policies.”
On March 12, a senior administrator at a university in India sent a business proposal to a prolific economist in Ethiopia. If he joined the school’s stable of adjunct professors, the administrator promised, easy money could be made.
“Surely I will do that. Not a big deal,” replied Mohd Asif Shah, an associate professor at Kebri Dehar University, in eastern Ethiopia.
But the deal turned sour. Although Shah listed SIMATS as an affiliation on at least two researchpapers he published this fall, in December he still hadn’t received any payments from the school, he complained. Then he turned to LinkedIn to share his frustration in a post that included screenshots of his conversation with Thangavelu, who is also a professor at Saveetha Dental College, part of SIMATS.
A psychologist in Australia has earned a pair of retractions after publishing several papers with international coauthors suspected of authorship fraud, Retraction Watch has learned.
Kelly-Ann Allen, an associate professor at Monash University, in Clayton, and editor-in-chief of two psychologyjournals, declined to comment for this article.
The retractionnotices, both in Frontiers journals, cite an investigation by the publisher confirming “a serious breach of our authorship policies and of publication ethics.”
Retractions are the stuff of nightmares for most academics. But they aren’t necessarily a career obstacle, and sometimes may be the only way forward, according to Andrew P. Anderson, a postdoctoral researcher in the biology department of Reed College, in Portland, Ore. Last month, the journal Evolutionpulled and replaced a study Anderson had conducted as a PhD student under Adam G. Jones at the University of Idaho, in Moscow. The study’s findings suggested sexual selection shaped the responsiveness of the human genome to male sex hormones. Below is a lightly edited Q&A we did with Anderson about his experience.
Retraction Watch (RW): In the summer of 2022, shortly after your paper was first published, you realized it contained a significant error. What happened?
Just four months after an allegedly stolen dinosaur fossil was returned from Germany to Brazil, a prominent European paleontologist published a paper bound to spark renewed controversy in an already-divided research community.
And so it did: Less than a month after the article, which criticized the online repatriation campaign, was published on October 2 in The Geological Curator, it vanished again.
A deluge of bizarre and malicious emails targeting a professor at Harvard Medical School has left him reeling, while raising questions about the smear campaign’s use of a popular online forum where scientists publicly critique research.
Joseph Loscalzo sent a letter to PubPeer, the online forum, in September describing an “aggressive cyberstalking and harassment campaign” that “has relentlessly targeted myself and my colleagues” for many months with “misleading and often inaccurate comments.” He called PubPeer “a vehicle” for the attacks, alleging anonymous comments raising concerns about at least 15 papers were posted “in bad faith” and then used to defame and badger him in emails to other researchers, journals, and universities.
Loscalzo, physician-in-chief emeritus and former chair of the department of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, asked PubPeer to remove the offending comments and impose a six-month moratorium on anonymous posts about his work. The letter was obtained by Retraction Watch.
A paper that claimed to have developed a new method to predict acid drainage from mines was not so novel after all, according to one of its authors.
In a series of emails to Retraction Watch, Dulian Zeqiraj of the Polytechnic University of Tirana, Albania, admitted to lifting figures and tables from other articles and said he might also have left some “text as it is in original.”
That the article managed to clear peer review is astonishing, said Muhammad Muniruzzaman, a senior scientist at the Geological Survey of Finland in Espoo, who discovered last week that Zeqiraj’s team had plagiarized his work.
A PhD student in Switzerland who blogged about a series of dubious conferences linked to potential citation fraud is being sued by one of the conference chairs, a professor of computer science, Retraction Watch has learned.
The professor, Shadi Aljawarneh of the Jordan University of Science and Technology, reaped a prodigious number of citations from the conference proceedings, often in highly questionable ways.
“Fraud can pay off,” Solal Pirelli, a doctoral student at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, wrote on his blog in January. “Shadi Aljawarneh has 6082 citations and an h-index of 38 per Google Scholar, above many well-regarded researchers. This probably helped him sit on the editorial board of PeerJ Computer Science, alongside well-regarded researchers.”
