Retraction Watch

A scholar who famously fabricated a meeting between Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky used a bogus name to publish a 1985 paper in the journal History –  and it was far from the first time. 

Arnold Harvey, also known as AD Harvey, apparently created a small (precisely how small is unclear) community of scholars, including Stephanie Harvey, Graham Headley, Trevor McGovern, John Schellenberger, Leo Bellingham, Michael Lindsay and Ludovico Parra, as well as the Latvian poet Janis Blodnieks. 

In a ruse outlined in this 2013 article for the Times Literary Supplement by Eric Naiman, of UC Berkeley, this fictitious klatch would critique each other’s papers. (Take note, peer review rings of the 2010s.)

As The Guardian wrote in a 2013 profile of Harvey that’s well worth a read:

An author with ties to researchers believed to have published hundreds of problematic papers has earned his ninth retraction, this time for forged authorship. 

Mostafa Jalal, once a postdoc at Texas A&M University, is alleged to have “engaged in some manner of collaboration or communication” with three other researchers, including Ali Nazari, who has now had 85 papers retracted and lost his job at Swinburne University in 2019. Those retractions came after the whistleblower, the pseudonymous Artemisia Stricta, called attention to problems in Nazari’s work.

In a 42-page report we wrote about in August 2020, Artemisia drew attention to four main groups centered on Jalal, Nazari, Ehsan Mohseni of the University of Newcastle in Australia, and Alireza Najigivi of Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. The whistleblower lists a total of 287 potentially compromised papers.