Category: fake credentials

On November 12, Richard Addante, an associate editor at the journal Frontiers in Psychology, received an alarming email from someone purporting to be a faculty member at a university in China. 

“I have a lot of papers to publish, papers on computers, medicine, materials, and so on,” the email, signed by a “Wei Yang” of Zhengzhou College of Business and Industry, stated. “If you can help me publish my paper, I’ll pay you $1500 as a referral fee.” 

To Addante, a psychologist at Florida Institute of Technology, in Melbourne, the message suggested the field of scientific publishing needed a thorough clean-up.

Continue reading Bribery offers from China rattle journal editors. Are they being scammed?

By the time Shiladitya Sen was officially declared guilty of research misconduct in 2018 by U.S. federal officials, The Ohio State University had long since stripped him of his doctorate in chemistry. 

Years later, however, Sen is still billing himself as a PhD in the signature of his work email at a company that provides lab mice and other animals to many scientists, Retraction Watch has learned.

Sen, now a director of analytical chemistry at Charles River Laboratories, with headquarters in Wilmington, Mass., confirmed to us by phone that he has not earned another doctoral degree. He hung up when asked why his email signature claims he has a PhD.

Continue reading Chemist who cooked data claims PhD years after it was revoked

Have you heard about hijacked journals, which take over legitimate publications’ titles, ISSNs, and other metadata without their permission? We recently launched the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, and will be publishing regular posts like this one to tell the stories of some of those cases.

In early 2021, unknown hijackers stole the domain of the Turkish Journal of Rehabilitation and Physiotherapy. According to the journal’s legitimate publishers:

Continue reading Meet the hijacked journal that keeps rising from the ashes

Two years ago, we reported on a website based in Russia that claimed to have brokered authorships for more than 10,000 researchers. (Apparently, neither our coverage nor a cease-and-desist letter from Clarivate Analytics had any effect on the site’s operations.)

And now, we bring you news of what look like two very similar sites — one out of Iran, and one out of Latvia.

The site in Iran, Teziran.org, claims to offer a variety of services, from help with immigration issues to scientific training. What caught our eye in particular was a section of the site (pictured above) that lists a number of “articles ready for acceptance” — at least by Google Translate:

Continue reading Introducing two sites that claim to sell authorships on scientific papers

We have a confession right up front: You won’t meet the man — a man who claims to be a brain surgeon, no less — we refer to in the headline. 

That is because, dear reader, we were not able to contact the person who publishes under the name Michael George Zaki Ghali.

What we do know is that someone using Ghali’s name bought two fake web domains for the Karolinska Institutet to make it look as though he was affiliated with the world-famous medical center and published seven dozen papers in peer reviewed journals owned by Elsevier, IMR Press, Taylor & Francis and Wiley. So far, seven those articles have now been retracted, by our count, including recently a 2020 paper in Acta Cardiologica that included CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer as a co-author. [See an update on this post.]

Continue reading Meet the alleged brain surgeon who squats on domains, punks journals and listed Wolf Blitzer as a co-author

A study that warned of the perils of using face masks as a precaution against contracting Covid-19 appears slated for retraction, Retraction Watch has learned. 

[Please see an update on this post.]

The 2020 paper, “Facemasks in the COVID-19 era: A health hypothesis,” was written by Baruch Vainshelboim, who listed his affiliation as Stanford University and the VA Palo Alto Health System. But the study gained wide circulation earlier this month, thanks in part to some conservative politicians, and became the subject of fact-checks by the Associated Press and Snopes, which pointed out that 

The paper was published by an exercise physiologist with no academic connection to Stanford University or the NIH in a journal that accepts “radical, speculative and non-mainstream scientific ideas.”

Among the claims in the article are that:

Continue reading Elsevier journal to retract widely debunked masks study whose author claimed a Stanford affiliation

The Lancet Global Health has swiftly retracted a letter to the editor purportedly describing the experience of nurses treating coronavirus in Wuhan, China, just two days after it was published, because the authors are now saying it “was not a first-hand account.”

In the original letter, the authors write:

Continue reading Lancet journal retracts letter on coronavirus because authors say it “was not a first-hand account” after all