Ariel Karlinsky was confused. A Ph.D. student at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he had just received a message stating the paper he had submitted to an economics conference in Moldova had been accepted.
But Karlinsky hadn’t submitted his work to the conference. In fact, he had never even heard about the event.
To guard against identity theft, academic publishers have been using institutional email addresses to verify authors and reviewers are who they say they are. Now, however, findings appearing in a preprint last month on arXiv.org suggest bad actors have found a way to breach this defense – and are routinely doing so.
From a pool of thousands of reviewer profiles set up as part of AI conferences in 2024 and 2025, staff at the nonprofit OpenReview, a platform connecting authors with reviewers, found 94 profiles involving fake identities. In all but two cases, the impostors had used “round-trip-verified” email addresses belonging to the domains of “reputed” universities, the authors write. (The remaining two used “.edu” domains of defunct institutions.)
Impersonating someone else using an institutional email address “adds another layer of challenge in the detection” of bad actors, said first author Nihar B. Shah of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who also sits on OpenReview’s board.
A university investigation in Hong Kong found that a professor used the email account of a former student to conduct all the correspondence needed to edit special issues of two journals, Retraction Watch has learned.
The two special issues, which were published last year, are full of articles with the hallmarks of paper mills, said Dorothy Bishop, an Oxford psychologist and scientific sleuth who flagged the matter to the institution involved in the case.
Last November, Bishop emailed the president of Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) with the information that Kaifa Zhao, a PhD student at the university, was listed as the lead editor for two special issues of the Journal of Environmental and Public Health and Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, both journals published by Hindawi. The nearly 300 articles in the special issues were “mostly meaningless gobbledegook” that suggested they came from a paper mill, she wrote.
Anna Abalkina noticed something odd about a psychology paper on the “modern problems of youth extremism”: The corresponding author was affiliated with a university in Russia, but his email address had a domain name from India.
The unusual domain name was part of a pattern Abalkina, of the Freie Universität Berlin, noticed in hundreds of papers that seemed to have been produced by papermills.
Six of those papers, including the one on youth extremism, had been published in the Journal of Community Psychology, a Wiley title. Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, conducted a detailed review of the six articles, along with the published referee reports and editorial correspondence on Publons, to see if anything else about them was amiss.
A retired professor of education has lost three papers – which he said he helped edit for a former student – after the publisher discovered manipulated peer review led to their acceptance.
Roger Shouse, an associate professor emeritus at Penn State College of Education, spent the 2018-2019 academic year at Sichuan University in China as a professor of public administration. While there, he helped several students write research articles in English, and advised one who listed him as a coauthor on three papers even though Shouse didn’t ask for authorship, he told us.
Those papers – on land use, climate vulnerability and disaster response among rural communities in Bangladesh – were retracted from the journal Land Use Policy this past August, after an investigation revealed the peer review process had been manipulated.
Shouse was listed as the last author, and researcher Md Nazirul Islam Sarker of Neijiang Normal University was the first author. A fourth paper retracted at the same time, with an identical retraction notice, listed Sarker as second author but did not include Shouse.
In late 2021, editors at Laboratory Investigation noticed something strange. The journal was receiving far more emails than usual asking to withdraw manuscripts that were already being peer reviewed. And some of the emails were strikingly similar, even using the same unusual language.
A total of five identical emails said that the authors had new results to add to the manuscript:
A Springer Nature journal has retracted a paper sourced from a paper mill – not an uncommon occurrence nowadays. What adds a bit of intrigue is that the manuscript was submitted with a fake email address to keep the alleged corresponding author from knowing about it.
A total of 436 papers in two Springer Nature journals are being subjected to expressions of concern, in the latest case of special issues — in this case, “topical collections” — likely being exploited by rogue editors or impersonators.
The move follows the discovery, as we reported in August, of more than 70 papers in a collection in one of the journals, the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, that referred to subjects — aerobics and running wear, for example — seemingly unrelated to geology. That sleuthing began on PubPeer and was broadened by Alexander Magazinov and Guillaume Cabanac. We have now learned that Springer Nature had already been looking into the issues.
Here’s the notice that appears with a list of more than 400 articles from three differenttopicalcollections for the Arabian Journal of Geosciences:
What do aerobics and dance training have to do with geology?
If that sounds like an odd question, take a look at more than 70 articles in a special collection of the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, published by Springer Nature, with titles such as:
