Category: forged authorship

In February, Steffen Barra Googled his name. A clinician working in the field of forensic psychiatry, he was in the habit of periodically checking if anything negative had been written about him. What he didn’t expect to find was a plagiarized paper with his name attached to it. 

Barra, a researcher at the University of Saarland in Germany, told us the 2023 article, “Introducing the Complexities of Forensic Psychology: Decoding the Mind Behind the Crime,”   plagiarized from an information page from a company offering online courses. The article also resembles many college informational pages about the field, such as this one from the University of North Dakota, he said. 

Concerned he might be blamed for the misconduct, Barra immediately contacted the publisher, Hilaris. 

A company representative responded to Barra the same day, February 29, with one phrase: “We will remove the link.” 

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.

Elsevier journals are retracting eight studies after learning that one of the authors on the papers was “fictitious” – as in a similar case we reported on recently. 

The ostensible author, Toshiyuki Bangi, was listed as affiliated with the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The eight studies, which were cited a collective 47 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, were published in three different journals — Construction and Building Materials, the Journal of Building Engineering, and Case Studies in Construction Materials. 

The retraction notice is the same for each paper, and states: 

On July 21, Derek Woollins received an email asking that an article be withdrawn from a journal he supposedly helped edit. 

But although Woollins was listed on the journal’s website as a member of its editorial board, he had never even heard of the publication. 

Woollins, a professor of synthetic chemistry at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, later learned that he is also listed on the editorial board of other journals from the same publisher –  Scholars Research Library – again, with no involvement in any of them. (Some academics have even found themselves listed as editors in chief of journals they have nothing to do with.)

Woollins told us: 

Talk about artificial intelligence. Fifteen studies published in various journals name a mysterious computer scientist as an author.

The problem? He doesn’t seem to exist. 

Dragan Rodriguez is listed as being affiliated with Case Western Reserve University, but an official at the Cleveland institution told a sleuth no one of that name has been associated with the university.

The studies on which Rodriguez’s name appears range in topic from cancer detection to “renewable energy systems optimization.” The papers were published since 2018 in 10 journals from four major scientific publishers since 2018, including the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy and the Journal of Building Engineering, which have both historically had impact factors above 7, and  Applied Energy, whose impact factor has been above 11. They have been cited a total of 232 times. 

Anca Turcu was going over her publication stats a few weeks ago, as she does every year to apply for research awards and update her CV, when she found an “unpleasant surprise.” 

Turcu, a senior lecturer in the University of Central Florida’s School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs, was listed as the sole author of an article entitled “Impact of government intervention measures on recycling of waste equipment in China,” which had been published in the African Journal of Political Science in February 2022. 

She hadn’t written the paper, which had nothing to do with her research on diasporas and voting. But that wasn’t the worst of it. 

A major research institution has accused a former postdoc of forging letters of recommendation from a supervisor, according to a court complaint. 

Georgios Laliotis was terminated by The Ohio State University on Nov. 30, 2021, according to the complaint filed in Franklin County Municipal Court, which we’ve made available here. Earlier that month, his PI, cancer researcher Philip Tsichlis, had uncovered manipulated data in two papers on which Laliotis was the first author, and emailed journal editors to retract them, as we previously reported. 

Emails released to us by OSU following a public records request indicated that Laliotis had been working at Johns Hopkins at the time, but OSU staffers had been told he had resigned his position effective November 24 and would go back to Greece. Whether he was employed by both universities simultaneously is unclear.