Category: authorship issues

In 2019, Retraction Watch ran an exclusive story of a Russian paper mill operating under the business name “International Publisher LLC”.  Since then, Retraction Watch and  other scientific news and blogging sites have continued to report on the activities of research paper mills, including International Publisher  and its primary website, 123mi.ru.  These mills provide an array of fraudulent services to researchers and academics seeking to publish articles in peer-reviewed journals.  The services they provide include ghostwriting, brokering authorship positions on papers accepted for publication, and falsifying data.

Our project  augments this stream of reports about paper mills as we focus on the activities of International Publisher and the papers brokered through 123mi.ru.  As part of this project we are curating  a database of all the papers and authorship positions that have been advertised on this website.  Our database consists of roughly 2,353 unique article titles with 8,928 authorship positions.  While the majority of the known paper mill activity has been in the biomedical sciences, our work on just this one paper mill demonstrates that paper mill products have infiltrated multiple scientific disciplines in which career advancement is heavily reliant on academic publications. 

So far, we have identified nearly 200 published articles that may have been brokered through this paper mill and which cross disciplines including (but not limited to) humanities, social sciences, nursing, and education.  We also observe numerous papers on COVID-19 that have been or currently are advertised for sale.  

Our project is far from complete, but we thought it important to report on our methods and preliminary findings via Retraction Watch.  In doing so, we hope to raise awareness of a serious and potentially widespread problem, along with strategies to help detect and possibly prevent fraudulent activities.  

Continue reading Revealed: The inner workings of a paper mill

A paper that sought to bring some math to the idea that the spread of COVID-19 could be tracked in human excrement has been retracted because of the authors submitted it to two different Elsevier journals on the same day — and because of some eyebrow-raising behavior by the alleged peer reviewers. 

The first author of the article was Ernestine Atangana, a researcher in the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein. 

The article, “Will the extraction of COVID-19 from wastewater help flatten the curve?,” appeared in Chemosphere in May — where it caught the eye of a researcher in the field (who did not want to be identified) who was struck by its sheer awfulness. (We should note that others have explored the same idea, and come to mixed conclusions.)

Among the more risible sections, the researcher told us, was this: 

Continue reading COVID-19 wastewater tracking paper ends up in the sewer

A researcher in Bangladesh who fabricated a list of co-authors — and possibly her data, too — in a paper on dengue fever that was recently retracted has published the same article in a different journal.

In 2019, Farzana Ahmed was a pediatric intensivist at United Hospital Ltd, in Dhaka, when she published a study in the Journal of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University. Titled “Diagnostic value of ferritin for the severity of dengue infection in children,” the article described a study of: 

Continue reading Researcher republishes paper retracted for fake authorship — with a different co-author

There’s an “us” in lupus, but no “we” — at least in the case of a 2020 paper whose list of authors was a fabrication. 

Published in the journal Lupus, the article, “Antibodies to cellular prion protein and its cognate ligand stress-inducible protein 1 in systemic lupus erythematosus,” was written by a group led by Jozélio F Carvalho, a rheumatologist at the University of São Paulo. Or rather, by Carvalho himself. 

According to the notice: 

Continue reading Wait, how did my name end up on that paper?

Just because you work in a lab doesn’t mean you get to call the data you produce your own. Ask Constantin Heil.

In the mid-2010s, Heil was a PhD student at La Sapienza University in Rome, where he conducted studies with his mentor, Giuseppe Giannini. That research led to Heil’s dissertation, a paper titled “One size does not fit all: Cell type specific tailoring of culture conditions permits establishment of divergent stable lines from murine cerebellum.”  

Heil — who is now working in Switzerland for a company called SOPHiA Genetics — used some of those data to publish a 2019 article, “Hedgehog pathway permissive conditions allow generation of immortal cell lines from granule cells derived from cancerous and non-cancerous cerebellum,” in a peer-reviewed journal, Open Biology, which belongs to the Royal Society.

Continue reading There is no I in data: Former grad student has paper retracted after mentor objects

Want to be a first author on a scholarly paper? A Russian company has you covered — starting at about $500. The company claims to have added the names of more than 10,000 researchers to more than 2,000 published articles in scholarly journals over the past three years. Think eBay — or perhaps StubHub — for unscrupulous scientists. 

Although we can’t verify the numbers, at least one major journal indexer, from whom we recently learned of the scheme, is concerned enough about the site that it has demanded that it stop doing business. 

According to the Russian outfit’s site (through Google Translate): 

Continue reading Exclusive: Russian site says it has brokered authorships for more than 10,000 researchers