Lori Youmshajekian

Buying a first author slot can cost you anywhere from $56 to $5,600

The market for fake authorship on a research paper has prices to match every budget, according to a new dataset compiled from thousands of advertisements on social media platforms and paper mill websites.

The dataset, called BuyTheBy, is the first systematic attempt to understand the market for paper mill products, according to its creators. It compiles more than 18,000 text-based advertisements from seven paper mills operating across India, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Latvia, Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan, collected at various points between March 2020 to April 2026. The researchers found prices vary widely depending on geography, ranging from $56 to $5,631 for a first author slot, according to a preprint submitted to arXiv.

Several of the advertisements appear to correspond with published papers subsequently published in the targeted journals, with identical titles to those advertised. But cracking down on the industry with datasets such as these will be difficult, some experts say, especially as the business model evolves rapidly with AI.

Another retraction and two investigations for chemist

A chemist in Austria who earned a retraction earlier this year is under investigation by his former university, a national research integrity agency and the publisher Elsevier, Retraction Watch has learned, while scrutiny of his publication record has broadened to include more papers flagged on PubPeer.

Maximilian Lackner, a technical chemist and process engineer at FH Technikum Wien in Austria until October last year, according to his ORCID profile, was the senior and corresponding author on a paper in npj Science of Food retracted in January after publishers discovered the five of the cited references weren’t relevant to the claims they were meant to be supporting. The 2024 article has been cited 90 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Editors also pointed out the information in a flow diagram for selecting studies didn’t appear anywhere else in the article. One of the authors, Fatemeh Ahmadi of the University of Western Australia, told the journal she and Lackner disagreed with the retraction. When we asked why, Ahmadi said the authors were “not interested” in our request for further information.

Major pharmacology journals flag another 15 papers by scientist facing criminal probe

A leading pharmacologist in Italy accused of embezzling research funds is now the subject of coordinated editorial action by one of the field’s professional societies.

The American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics announced expressions of concern for 12 papers, corrections for two and a retraction in an editorial published April 3 in The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and Molecular Pharmacology. Salvatore Cuzzocrea, a pharmacology professor at the University of Messina, was a coauthor or corresponding author on all the papers. As we reported previously, Cuzzocrea is being investigated in Italy for allegedly embezzling more than 2 million euros in research reimbursements and allegedly rigging university contracts.

Since our reporting on Cuzzocrea a year ago, journals have retracted five more of his papers. One, from BMC Neuroscience, was retracted 10 days after our reporting for containing data that appeared in an earlier publication. A different paper was retracted last year from Biology for containing overlapping images, another from Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy for image overlaps, and the International Journal of Molecular Science retracted two more this year for containing duplications and “inappropriate editing” of micrographs.

Bloodhound code sniffs out copied-and-pasted numerical data

Markus Englund, a software developer and sleuth based in the Netherlands, first hit paydirt with invasive plant species in China. After having scanned 12 other published scientific datasets with his novel detection software with no results, he came across one showing something suspicious: rows and rows of measurements of plant roots repeated across entirely different species.

“I was really excited,” he said in a recent call with Retraction Watch. “I couldn’t think of any innocent explanation for why that would be the case.”

Englund had built a tool dedicated to “purging” fabricated data by identifying “impossible” data in spreadsheets available on open repositories, according to Science Detective, his site about the initiative. From his initial review, he has found 18 datasets containing duplicated values that are possibly serious enough to need correcting — including one from an influential paper on Parkinson’s disease, as The Transmitter recently reported. (Retraction Watch’s cofounder Ivan Oransky is that publication’s editor-in-chief.)

A citation alert led researchers to a network of fake articles. But who is benefiting?

A few months ago, when Elle O’Brien, a data scientist at the University of Michigan, was checking who had recently cited her work on Google Scholar, she came across something that would take her and her colleagues down “a rabbit hole.”

When O’Brien opened a publication that had recently cited her, it appeared to be a rewritten version of an arXiv preprint she had co-authored with two colleagues, Grischa Liebel and Sebastian Baltes. Yet this did not seem to be a simple case of theft by other academics.

For starters, the six authors listed on the fake article didn’t exist, although three had been given the same institutional affiliations as O’Brien, Liebel, and Baltes: the University of Michigan, Reykjavik University and Heidelberg University, respectively. The similarities in the texts read as if someone had typed, “ChatGPT, please rephrase this paper without changing anything else,” Liebel wrote in a post on LinkedIn. But why would fake authors need publications?

University of Melbourne opens formal investigation into education researcher John Hattie

The University of Melbourne has opened a formal investigation into the prominent Australia-based education researcher John Hattie, backtracking on a decision months ago that concerns about his work didn’t warrant further scrutiny.

The investigation, confirmed in a letter seen by Retraction Watch, was triggered by allegations made by Stephen Vainker, a teacher and former doctoral researcher in the United Kingdom, who documented what he says are hundreds of instances of plagiarism and data errors across Hattie’s body of work. The investigation also follows our coverage last August.

Vainker also discovered what seems to be a hallucinated reference in one of Hattie’s recent writings, prompting a book publisher to remove it from the work.

Chemist nears three dozen retractions for image duplication, self-citation and more

A screenshot of Louis’ LinkedIn profile before we reached out to him.

Racking up 35 retractions in just 24 months, chemist Hitler Louis has scored a place on our leaderboard.

The papers at issue, most of them published in Elsevier and Royal Society of Chemistry journals, exhibit a variety of problems, according to the retraction notices: identical plots supposedly representing different chemical systems, self-citations multiplying between manuscript submission and publication, compromised peer review and fundamental errors in chemical analyses.

Louis – who also goes by Louis Hitler Muzong – did not respond to Retraction Watch’s requests for comment. Until recently, his LinkedIn page named him as a Ph.D. student in computational chemistry at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, with an expected completion date of October 2027. But retraction notices for two papers say Louis requested his Leeds affiliation be removed. One states “the research described in the article is not associated with that institution,” and the other that the affiliation “was given incorrectly.” The University of Leeds did not respond to a request to verify whether he was a student there.

Gynecologists in Italy collect more retractions and an expression of concern

A group of gynecologists in Italy has tallied yet another retraction, this time for an article with “significant overlap” with the methods, data and text of an older paper that shares two of the same authors.

The paper, which involved research on a treatment for infertility, is the latest in a string of retractions for Sandro Gerli and Gian Carlo Di Renzo of the University of Perugia, and Vittorio Unfer, now at Saint Camillus International University of Health Sciences in Rome. Just a few weeks earlier, the researchers also received an expression of concern on a separate paper examining a widely used supplement for polycystic ovary syndrome.

Commenters on PubPeer began to flag the researchers’ papers two years ago, and they now have 11 retractions among them, largely for duplicated data and text across the publications, as well as undisclosed conflicts of interest and unreliable study methods. In 2024, Di Renzo threatened legal action over a critic’s allegations about data duplications among several papers he coauthored — many of which have since been retracted.

One of Kazakhstan’s top nuclear physicists also leads his nation in retractions

The head of a nuclear physics institute in Kazakhstan now has 21 retractions to his name — most of them logged in the past year — following dozens of his papers being flagged on PubPeer for data reuse and images showing suspiciously similar patterns of background noise, suggesting manipulation.

Maxim Zdorovets, director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Astana, has written or coauthored 480 papers indexed on Scopus, and one analysis puts him as the third most cited researcher in Kazakhstan. His prolific publication record has been linked to Russian paper mills, though those claims are unverified. Zdorovets has defended his work in a series of online posts, arguing the imaging similarities come from technical issues and that his own analyses prove image manipulation did not occur. He did not respond to Retraction Watch’s request for comment.

The latest retraction for Zdorovets came last month when Crystallography Reports retracted a study containing electron microscope images “highly similar” to those published a year earlier in a now-retracted paper in the Russian Journal of Electrochemistry by a similar group of authors. Both papers also included images that closely resemble ones Zdorovets and his colleagues presented at a nanomaterials conference in Ukraine in 2017. In each instance, the images were meant to be showing different materials.

Exclusive: A misconduct ruling, a flawed investigation, and an attempted payoff

In April 2019, Daejung Kim, then a Ph.D. student at the University of Melbourne in Australia, found a draft manuscript on the desk of a postdoc in the same laboratory. The manuscript included the experimental results on metal alloys he had spent months collecting. Kim hadn’t been told about the paper, nor had anyone asked his permission to use the data. The findings were central to Kim’s Ph.D. thesis and publishing them would mean the data were no longer original.

“I was shaking in the lab,” he recalled recently. “When I saw it, I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t know what to do.”

Kim took his concerns to his supervisor, Kenong Xia, a materials scientist and head of the lab, asking for his help to resolve the issue. He wanted to be credited as a coauthor on any papers using his results. He also emailed the postdoc, Ahmad Zafari, asking to see a draft of the paper.

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