There is a
#papermill
at Shahid Beheshti Uni Med Sci, Tehran.
Some of the customers later pop up at Western universities.
It is very possible that Ali Akbar Velayati, senior adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader in international affairs, is running the show.
A 🧵.
This thread will expose some notable connections of the embattled Spanish "chemist" Rafael Luque.
It is a call to action to start rooting out the fraud network. It would be a mistake to treat Luque as a single funny case. Read about Luque here:
A texbook case of coercive citation manipulation means, by a certain scholar from the University of Queensland. There are much more stuff like this in
@MDPIOpenAccess
journals, literally dozens in 2H 2022.
Similar papers from 2023 exist, but the reviews are closed.
There are some puzzling names among the 1k+ authors of one of the "Global Burden of Disease" studies.
- Javad Sharifi-Rad
- Mohammad Reza Saeb
- Khalid Mehmood
- Andrey N Birko
- Ebrahim Mostafavi
I am quite curious about their contribution.
I'll stop here.
This thread could be shorter, or even never appear, if people paid attention to what was going on. It was all certainly preventable before 2020.
It may be preventable even now. But when I think about the amount of effort needed, I'm scared.
This is from an interesting collaboration of Luque,
One notable author is Dmitry O. Bokov, from Sechenov Medical University in Moscow. Bokov is nominally a food chemist, but has "written" articles on nearly everything.
Philippe Garrigues, the editor-in-chief of Environmental Science and Pollution Research, acts as "responsible editor" for 1600+ publications per year. Moving on, nothing to see here.
Imagine yourself a papermill owner with a sizeable backlog of publications. How do you deal with it? You run a special issue, of course!
@ElsevierConnect
won't ever bother to check the guest editors' background.
@Andrew_Akbashev
"Scientists are not afraid to discuss science!"
Even this assertion appears to be somewhat conditional nowadays.
"The raw data is confidential."
"Your request is deemed not reasonable."
"Let's discuss the issue you raised privately via email. (I won't respond.)"
Familiar?
"What was Hoang doing in Spain? Meeting the Highly Cited Researcher and the king of papermilling citation-trading cheaters, Rafael Luque..."
Perhaps this is the key?
And this is an outright fake by Hagfeldt, sourced in Xi'an Jiaotong university, - surprise! - the same place where Luque held a guest position around 2017-2019.
Hey
@SpringerNature
, do you still approve of Rafal Marszalek's performance as
@SciReports
' EiC? With the papermilling inflow as inexhaustible as ever?
Ugh.
@SciReports
issues a Correction for a paper with authors from 11 different affilations in 7 countries, that appears to have copied images from another paper and with impossible 'drunk' plots like these. Likely
#PaperMill
- should be retracted.
Some subplots may well have slipped out of my narrative, for which I apologize.
Remember this is an open call. Discover, report, help the sleuths root the scam out.
And the editor is a quantum theoretician / cosmologist. Which makes him perfectly qualified to handle a paper on theoretical foundations of homeopathy, lol.
Are you freaking serious,
@ElsevierConnect
? What next journal will you acquire?
Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine.
A cyclophosphamide-induced immunosuppression Swiss Albino mouse model unveils a potential role for cow urine distillate as a feed additive.
What is interesting, both Luque and Len were at the same time (and probably still are) on the editorial board of Scientific Reports. We'll get back to it in a minute.
@gcabanac
@MDPIOpenAccess
@PubPeer
@RetractionWatch
@C0PE
Scrutiny is needed over each author of this piece and over their entire network.
However, no one from the publishing industry is going to do that. And the sleuthing community is too small to call out every crook.
A quick read of the T&F microbiome paper shows it contains some unexpected phrases:
* without germ mice = germ-free mice
* peevish inside disorder = irritable bowel syndrome
* fly slack = jet lag
Not wordings you would expect from microbiome researchers.
Someone may want to have a look at this article by Ramakrishna, Arjmand and Anders Hagfeldt, the rector / vice chancellor of Uppsala University and yet another holder of the "highly cited" title.
The author of this strange MDPI paper, Helene Banoun, has recorded a common paper with Sajad Karampoor, a papermiller who in turn has common papers with Dmitry Bokov and Maria Jade Catalan Opulencia.
cc
@SmutClyde
@nickwizzo
Poor editorial oversight at
@MDPIOpenAccess
allows an "independent researcher" to publish a paper that re-defines what gene therapy is. A 'scientific' journal provides science deniers a published reference to their broken claims, making our job harder.
More retractions in Journal of Energy Storage.
Zhixiong Li
@PolitechnikaOpo
is on all four of them. His colleague Grzegorz M Królczyk is on two. Paolo Gardoni
@MAE_Center
@UofIllinois
is also on two.
Per my sources, the institutions are silent.
Hello
@SpringerNature
. Are you sure that Seeram Ramakrishna is qualified to be Editor-in-Chief of Materials Circular Economy? 19
@PubPeer
entries are not reassuring... 🧵
Hoang was hired by Elsevier as one of the three senior co-editors of Fuel late last year or early this year. But he has already vacated this position.
Nonetheless, his short tenure was enough to have a number of Luque's articles accepted.
Courtesy of Javad Sharifi-Rad. Already on PubPeer.
But it seems worse than that.
All the underlined stuff should perhaps be written differently, but I can't figure out correct wording in many cases.
@gcabanac
@MicrobiomDigest
@deevybee
@nickwizzo
Papermilling pays off.
In Poland, a papermill client Grzegorz Królczyk, with several retractions, is appointed as a chairman of the Innovation Council of the Ministry of Science.
Proszę
@MNiSW_GOV__PL
powiedzieć, czy jest to nowa definicja innowacji w Polskie: kupowanie autorstwa artykułów naukowych od irańczyków, saudyjczyków i chińczyków. Bo właśnie tym Pan Królczyk i zajmuje się.
Tutaj ogłoszenie o powołaniu Rady:
Also an author of multiple review papers on anything and everything, usually with 10+ authors spread around the globe. And shaky citations to himself. Currently under fire from
@MicrobiomDigest
.
This is a gentle ping
@PubPeer
. Are you aware of a bug that the post doesn't render correctly at submission, including images, markdown and links?
As a workaround, you have to press edit, then send your post again.
@spy_sci
@MicrobiomDigest
@Thatsregrettab1
@author_for_sale
One can't make this up. A PubPeer post devoted to 10.3390/metabo13020183 exposes an extorted reference 245. Elham Ahmadian and Aziz Eftekhari are there. But there is also - surprise! - Rovshan Khalilov, and we've certainly seen him previously.
@Olive_Free
@ElsevierPhysics
Results in Physics is a non-journal, to begin with. It is being run by the same gang as another non-journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. That latter one came under fire in 2008. Back then, Elsevier pretended to act upon and fired El Naschie, but nothing like a deep overhaul.
.
@el_pais
you could have done a better factchecking job.
"Publish or die" is a tortured phrase. The correct one is "publish or perish".
The number of Hindawi retractions is now over 7000, not 1700.
The next one whom we see on that MOF-heat-transfer paper is Seeram Ramakrishna. Who also appears to have ties to Mohammad Arjmand, another "guest editor" of the scam "special issue" in Journal of Energy Storage.
And a customer of Masoud Afrand's papermilling enterprise. It is a "special issue" edited by Afrand where the paper from the previous post was published. Read about that shameless "special issue" here:
Most of the "hydrogen storage" "scientific literature" is stupid shit, plain fraud, or (typically) both.
"Green" discourse is hijacked by all kinds of corrupt butts.
A review of hydrogen storage materials & techniques with an AI-generated graphical abstract.
I assume the paper itself was also reviewed to the same high standard.
"Nacoing Enactouns" anyone?
Or perhaps you're more interested in "Scanling Empigirore"?
Call for papers. Advancements in Cybersecurity and Privacy: Emerging Challenges and Solutions at Journal of Umm Al-Qura University for Engineering and Architecture
@uqu_edu
Submit now:
Seyed Mohammad Sajadi from Iraq, nominally a phytochemist / nutrition expert, yet churning out papers on heat transfer topics.
Sajadi is one of the most reliable citation delivery boys for Yu-Ming Chu and Changhe Li, like here:
Call for papers!
#BMCChem
welcomes submissions to its new Collection on 'Drug delivery systems' , Guest Edited by Jayanta Kumar Patra and Seeram Ramakrishna. To find out more visit:
This is the case that can be straightforwardly escalated to
@C0PE
.
@MicrobiomDigest
, are you going to follow up on this? If not, I can get someone else to act.
The
@IEEEorg
Editor in Chief wrote me back:
"I am not interested who you are. I do not need to tell you what is justified. We do not deal with anonymous allegations or allegations coming from non-institutional email addresses"
(I write from my gmail address; I am not employed).
After a year,
@Hindawi
's BioMed Research International has been reindexed in the
@ClarivateAG
Web of Science. It will also receive a new Impact Factor this summer.
Hi
@SpringerNature
, are you sure that the content of this retraction note is accurate? I don't think this journal has run even a single special issue in quite a while.
My 200 tögrög to this story.
It's Xi'an Jiaotong, one of the least surprising places from where it could come.
Several stories of fraud coming from Xi'an Jiaotong are already known - featuring, for example,
🤡 Anders Hagfeldt
🤡 Rafael Luque
🤡 Omid Mahian
Here, Elsevier makes a proud announcement of a new SPECIAL ISSUE, edited by Masoud Afrand, Mohammad Arjmand, and Cong Qi.
I am curious about Elsevier's vetting processes through which this SI was approved.
Back to MOF-heat-transfer again, we also notice Navid Rabiee, who is not only an author, but also the recipient of many irrelevant citations. Rabiee is remarkable, because he is a bridge between Luque and Thomas J. Webster!
@Thatsregrettab1
What is exactly the scenario? If you are trying to remove a label from an image of YOUR OWN experiment, you probably also have the raw image without a label, to which you can go back.
If you are using a stolen or unrelated image, then you have to deal with the labels creatively.
📣 Read more about AR-NK cell’s therapeutic potential for treating solid tumors in this review "CAR-NK Cell: A New Paradigm in Tumor
#Immunotherapy
"
👨⚕️👩⚕️ Faroogh Marofi et al
Read here 👉
#CancerTreatment
#microenvironment
Sure.
That would be a useful idea around 2003, or maybe not even back then.
Also my prediction: the rule will change little if anything at all. "The editor reviewed the matter and found the citation request well-justified."
This is new for a review request in MDPI:
"We discourage reviewers from recommending citation of their own work when not clearly necessary to improve the quality of the manuscript under
review. State in your comments to the editor if you recommend citation of your own work.."👏
Verpoort carries a number of affiliations, among them is "National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University."
Which is a thin, yet visible, trail (via Mikhail A. Sheremet) to the magnetohydrodynamics guru Ali Jawad Chamkha.