Retraction Watch

On paper, data scientist Gunasekaran Manogaran has had a stellar scientific career. He earned an award as a young researcher from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and landed a series of postdoctoral and visiting researcher positions at universities in the U.S, including the University of California, Davis; Gannon University in Pennsylvania; and Howard University in Washington, D.C. His h-index — a measure of a researcher’s impact and productivity — is 60, a number that by one model would mark him as “truly unique” if achieved within 20 years. He did it in fewer than 10.

Emails obtained by Undark, however, suggest some researchers have doubts about his publishing record. The correspondence includes an initial message from someone claiming to have previously worked with Manogaran. It was sent to some 40 editors of scientific journals, many owned by major scientific publishers: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis among them.

The sender alleges that Manogaran and others run a research paper publishing scam — one that both generates revenues and artificially burnishes the scientific bona fides of individual and institutional participants. In particular, the alleged scheme targets what are known in the scientific publishing industry as “special issues” — self-contained special editions that are not part of a journal’s regular publishing schedule, typically focused on a single topic or theme.

The email, dated April 12, 2022, informs the journal editors that they may have partnered with members of this alleged scheme and urges them to take action. “If you don’t do that there would be a next group doing the same scam in name of different persons,” the email states.

The scientific paper inspired international headlines with its bold claim that the combination of brain scans and machine learning algorithms could identify people at risk for suicide with 91% accuracy.

The promise of the work garnered lead author Marcel Adam Just of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and co-author David Brent of the University of Pittsburgh a five-year, $3.8 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct a larger follow-up study.

But the 2017 paper attracted immediate and sustained scrutiny from other experts, one of whom attempted to replicate it and found a key problem. Nothing happened until this April, when the authors admitted the work was flawed and retracted their article. By then, it had been cited 134 times in the scientific literature, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science — a large amount for a young paper — and received so much attention online that the article ranks in the top 5% of all the research tracked by Altmetric, a data company focused on scientific publishing.

All this could have been avoided if the journal had followed the advice of its own reviewers, according to records of the peer-review process obtained by Retraction Watch. The experts who scrutinized the submitted manuscript for the journal before it was published identified many issues in the initial draft and a revised resubmission. One asked for the authors to replicate the work in a new group of study participants, and overall, they recommended rejecting the manuscript.