Category: forged authorship

The other day, Jamie Burr, an exercise physiologist in Canada, received a curious email from an overseas colleague. The researcher wanted to know if Burr, of the University of Guelph, had written a particular article.

Burr wondered:

Why are they questioning if I wrote something?

Turns out, something was real shady with the slim article.

Continue reading An exercise in frustration: A researcher is impersonated

Springer Nature has removed two studies that were published in its journal Cluster Computing and included a co-author who didn’t know that the papers existed until December 2020, years after they were published. 

The move follows reporting by Retraction Watch last week about the papers, which listed David Cox, the IBM Director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, as a co-author.

The studies–“A FCM cluster: cloud networking model for intelligent transportation in the city of Macau,” and “Mobile network intrusion detection for IoT system based on transfer learning algorithm,” disappeared from the publisher’s website on January 29th, without any retraction notices. 

A spokesperson for Springer Nature told Retraction Watch:

Continue reading Journal pulls two studies that listed an author without his permission

When David Cox noticed on Dec. 10, 2020 that two papers in the journal Cluster Computing listed him as an author, he didn’t think much of it at first.

I have a common name, so it is not unheard of to have an article written by another David Cox assigned to my profile. I thought that was what these papers must have been at first, but then I opened the articles and saw my affiliation, email, and picture in them.

Shocked, Cox tweeted that “the whole thing is yucky.” The corresponding author on the two studies now says that he plans to withdraw the papers, and that a co-author made the decision to include Cox’s name and has been fired from his research position over the incident. Yesterday, on January 25, the publisher flagged one of the papers.

Cox, who is the IBM Director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, in Cambridge, Mass., learned  about the articles after logging on to DBLP, a bibliography website that tracks articles published by computer scientists. “I check these sites from time to time to make sure everything is correct,” he said.

Continue reading “The whole thing is yucky:” When you’re surprised to find yourself as an author on a paper

A medical journal has retracted two papers by a researcher with a penchant for fabricating co-authors.

According to the Singapore Medical Journal and earlier news reports, Shunjie Chua published the articles with two fictitious authors: Mark Pitts and Peter Lamark, whom he placed at Duke University and the University of Chicago. 

The articles, “A simple, flexible and readily applicable method of boundary construction to prevent leech migration,” and “A handy way to handle hemoclips® in surgeries,” appeared in 2015. Per the retraction notice for the former: 

Continue reading Researcher faked the names of Duke and University of Chicago co-authors

A journal has retracted a paper on the semen of diabetic rats after learning about problems with authorship, and possibly more. 

Physiology International, which also is called Acta Physiologica Hungarica, published the article, “The effects of sericin in recovering spermatogenesis and sexual hormone levels in diabetic rats,” in 2019. The first author was Ali Olfati, of Tabriz University in Iran. The second author — on paper, at least — was Felipe Martínez-Pastor, of the University of León, in Spain. 

Not so. Per the retraction notice (which now directs to a “page not found” error):

Continue reading “I am the first one to regret not being more careful in the first place”: Paper on rat semen retracted

On December 29, Jan Behrends, of the Institute of Physiology at the University of Freiburg, in Germany, was checking his Google Scholar profile when he saw his name on a paper — one he’d played no part in writing. 

The article, “Microelectrochemical cell arrays for whole-cell currents recording through ion channel proteins based on trans-electroporation approach,” had appeared earlier that month in Analyst, a publication of the Royal Society of Chemistry. According to Behrends:  

Continue reading Former grad student forges his supervisor’s authorship — and gets smacked down

There’s a new publishing trend in town, says Mario Biagioli: Faking co-authors’ names. Biagioli, distinguished professor of law and science and technology studies and director of the Center for Innovation Studies at the University of California, Davis, writes in an article in Trends in Chemistry that it’s “the emergence of a new form of plagiarism that reflects the new metrics-based economy of scholarly publishing.” We asked him a few questions about what he’s found, and why authors might do this.

Retraction Watch (RW): You write that “A new trend in scientific misconduct involves listing fake coauthors on one’s publication.” Why would authors do that? Continue reading “A new form of plagiarism:” When researchers fake co-authors’ names

Kim Kardashian is known for many accomplishments. But now she can add another to her resume: First author of a paper in the Drug Designing & Intellectual Properties International Journal. What can we say? It’s international, and it’s a journal. We talked to Tomáš Pluskal, a post-doc at MIT and the last author of the paper — the middle author is Satoshi Nakamoto, the elusive “inventor of Bitcoin” — for the inside scoop.

Retraction Watch (RW): Our guess is that few scientists will have the opportunity to work with Kim Kardashian. How did you end up collaborating? Continue reading Kim Kardashian pairs up with an MIT post-doc to publish a scientific paper