Speaker 1: I have been absolutely obsessed with this. Essentially, this is a story about scientific publishing gone mad. Now, there are loads of ways that you can game the scientific publishing system. The ones that I've seen are that you end up with a little citation ring. That is, people on academic papers cite each other's work so that their metrics boost. The reason they want to boost their metrics is because as a scientist, as a researcher, the higher certain metrics, the more likely you are to get promotion, i.e. more money, and then also you're more likely to get grants. Another way to game the system is to put people's names who have not contributed anything to your paper. I've been guilty of it in the past because my supervisors who haven't really done much need to be on the paper because they are kind of like the gatekeepers to certain parts of money or instruments and that sort of stuff. But this story is different from anything I've heard before and it's fascinating to me. Like all good scientific publishing scandals, this starts with a citation ring, a citation ring that was being investigated by a super sleuth, Elizabeth Bick. Now, Dr. Bick's ability to find problematic papers, in my opinion, is unsurpassed. You can see here that she's got quite an interesting early life education, but this is where it really gets interesting. After working in the private sector, she left in 2018 to work full-time on analyzing scientific papers for image duplication and other malpractices. Now, you do not want this scientist on your case because once you are in the crosshairs, there is no escape. Now, it doesn't stop there. Once she found this Iranian publishing ring, there was someone else who tag-teamed in to this investigation, Alexander Magasinov. This is the best image that I could actually find of him. In 2020, his hobby became finding patterns in the scientific literature. These two are the Batman and Robin of finding questionable papers and reporting them. Once the Iranian publishing mill was in the crosshairs of Elizabeth Bick, Alexander also found that there was something strange about one of the authors that was listed on the papers. Enter Dragan Rodriguez. They couldn't quite work out who they were or why they were actually on the papers. Now, Dragan Rodriguez is actually apparently part of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Case Western Reserve University. But guess what? No one can find evidence that he actually exists and Case Western Reserve University have no evidence of a researcher by that name on their books at all. So why, therefore, is he on all of these papers? Applied energy, predicting runoff using whatever that means, sustainable energy combinations, power connection, multi-objective model, renewable energy. In this strange thing that I don't really understand, we've got him in energy reports. Evolving systems, optimize lung cancer detection, modifies locus swarm optimizer for oral cancer diagnosis with quite a wide range of publishers. Now, that didn't sit well with me, so I actually sent off my own email. Hi there, my name is Dr. Andrew Stoughton and I have noticed that you have published a peer-reviewed article with an author called Dragan Rodriguez. Notice I dropped in the doctor title, bit of credibility for me. I'd like to be put in contact with him but cannot find a contact email address there. Given that you have published together, I'd love that you could share their contact information so I can ask some questions about their research work. Now, here's the first thing I noticed about all the email addresses. There were very few institutional email addresses and a lot of them from this 163.com, which is essentially just like an email and internet service provider in China. And I sent this off and guess how many replies I've had? Zero, zero replies and one bounced email actually. Now, it really started to bother me. Why does this person exist? I looked on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. I could not find evidence of a scientist by that name that would happily say that that was them. But then it happened again. Toshiyuki Bangi does not exist either. He's affiliated with the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and eight studies were cited 47 times. And in this case, the corresponding author has admitted that they made up the person completely and that author was Kong Zhang. These fictitious authors are being added to papers because the original authors think that by having someone from a reputable university on their paper, it's going to make it easier to get through peer review. And to be honest with you, I can kind of understand why they do it because there are so many instances where desk rejections happen and that is when it arrives on the editor's desk of a journal and they just say no. It's rejected immediately for a range of reasons but by having a credible author on that paper, there's no doubt that it could potentially even a little bit improve the chances and even that little bit is worth putting on a fake name because this is a numbers game. These papers get submitted to a range of different journals and all you need is for it to sort of like get by one editor to peer review so then that process can start. And if you have a well-known author, it is well-known that it can improve your chances of publication in higher impact factor journals. That's a big issue in science and something that I really think needs to be addressed with double blind peer review systems. If you've got an editor with any bias, whether it be a bias for an institution, a certain researcher or otherwise, it can be incredibly damaging to the peer review process because certain institutions are favored and that needs to stop. And the only way I can really think about getting around this is by double blind reviewing. That is, you don't get to see the author, you don't get to see the institution, neither the editors or the peer reviewers know where it's coming from and therefore it is the science and research that is actually analyzed rather than this horrible game of notoriety, of famous researchers putting their names on papers. That is where we have a big issue. An NTU's research integrity officer said, I understand that this fictitious author was added to the paper as they thought that having an author from a well-known university would improve the paper's chances in the review process. And I think a lot of people would say that, no, if they were a reviewer, they wouldn't care about it. But the fact is enough people do that they've been willing to put a fake person on their paper. It is the big publishers that need to take control of this. They often have billion dollar profits and they are the ones that need to make sure that people exist when they say they exist and also they belong to the institutions that they belong to. I'm sure that there are many more examples of fake authors out there. They've just not been yet caught and therefore we're going to have to rely on more Batman and Robins of the scientific publishing world to find them. That shouldn't rely on people volunteering their time as hobbies to do this. It should be the publishers, if they want the profits, they need to have the checks and balances in place. If you liked this video, remember to go check out this one next where we talk about the unethical use of AI in real published peer-reviewed science. I couldn't believe it myself so go check it out. So there we are, there's everything you need to know about why people create fake authors. Let me know in the comments what you think and what you would add. I had never seen this before and I think if we were to scratch deeper and have an actual review, there'd be many more examples of fake researchers out there. Let me know in the comments if you've seen any more. Also remember there are more ways that you can engage with me. The first way is to sign up to my newsletter. Head over to andrewstoughton.com.au forward slash newsletter. The link is in the description and when you sign up, you'll get five emails over about two weeks. Everything from the tools I've used, the podcast I've been on, how to write the perfect abstract and more. It's exclusive content available for free so go sign up now and also remember to go check out academiainsider.com. 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