I have fairly simple opinions on scientific papers that are found to be full of fakery. I think that they should be retracted, expunged from the literature. I think that the people who submitted the manuscripts full of altered Western blots and manipulated photos should have to explain how it happened, and should explain why any journal should look at their submissions going forward. I completely understand that sometimes these things are due to the rogue actions of one co-author, but that means identifying who faked the results and explaining how these things got through the vetting of the other co-authors. (There’s also the question of how they get through the vetting of the referees and the journal editors). And as for labs that have been involved in these sorts of affairs several times over the years, well. . .why should they be publishing anywhere? Why should anyone look at the manuscripts at all? And why should any funding agency give them a dime?
Readers will have noticed that this is not how the world works. Take this case as an example: Elisabeth Bik called this paper out a year ago for image manipulation, and remember, “image manipulation” almost always means “data manipulation”. When you show supposedly independent spectra that have the exact same baseline noise, you have manipulated data. Why should anyone believe anything in your whole paper? And the same publication has a host of cut-and-paste issues in its TEM images; someone slapped the same bits of background in over and over, for reasons that we can only guess.
Well, it’s been a year, and now everything is just fine. The journal has issued a correction – turns out that the images in the original paper were “incorrect” and they have allowed the authors to submit the correct ones. There is no explanation for why the original version was faked-up, or how the new images were found or produced. There’s no explanation for anything, actually, except to say that “The revised images do not influence the data analysis and conclusions of the original paper. They fully support the conclusion. The authors apologize for any inconvenience caused.” So that’s OK, then! In the future, authors submitting to Wiley’s Advanced Functional Materials journal are advised that fake images are no real problem – if anyone even notices, you will have months and months to come up with something plausible to replace them. Nothing as gauche as an Expression of Concern or an actual retraction need occur. Order and harmony will be maintained.
The little problem with this approach is, of course, that such theatrical presentations are not what science is about. We are supposed to do our best to generate real results, real data, and communicate them to our peers so that we contribute to the sum of human knowledge. Striking poses and doing dance moves with fudged numbers and faked images doesn’t contribute a damned thing – in fact, it just pollutes the literature that we’re all supposed to be learning from. But there is an awful lot of that junk out there – consider this retraction by the Institute of Physics (IOP) of 350 papers at once. These were the proceedings of two different conferences, both organized by Arulmurugan Ramu of Presidency University in Kolkata, and I have no problem saying that these things are a pile of garbage. Almost all of them have citations jammed into them for Ramu’s own papers and those of his pals, for starters, and the papers themselves are full of convoluted near-gibberish that appears to be an attempt to mask the fact that the text itself was plagiarized (you run the source through a machine translation into another language and then send that back into English: instant paper!) The IOP has had problems like this before, and should never have let this trash fly into the air in the first place, but at least they’re doing the right thing and pulling it all. Perhaps Prof. Ramu should try a Wiley journal for his next Festschrift festival – then everyone can just revise and extend their remarks and the papers will stand, right?
But if we’re talking about trash, let’s revisit the smouldering pile of it produced by “Alireza Heidari”. I wrote about this situation a few years ago – in short, that’s a pseudonym for a guy in Irvine who has published scores of completely faked papers, all of which basically cite only his other faked papers. And he lists his affiliation as the nonexistant “California South University” whose website is another pile of fakery. It doesn’t really seem to have changed since 2018, when I did that blog post – it’s still a mass of material ripped off from the University of Alberta’s actual web site and a bunch of random articles from Wikipedia, all held together with spiderwebs and dried pancake syrup. None of it stands up to thirty seconds of actual scrutiny; you foot goes through the floorboards immediately. People have been writing about this idiocy for years, and it should be nothing more than a punchline now.
You’d think. But “Heidari” continues to publish away, as I see from the Journal of Incredible Chemistry account on Twitter. He has a profile on ResearchGate, where he has the nerve to list his affiliation as UC-Irvine, but the photo is the same one from the California South web site. Here’s a recent “paper” from him and 11 of his nonexistant colleagues from good ol’ California South, and you will note a certain lack of imagination in some of the co-authors’ names, which include Jennifer Esposito and Jimmy Kimmel. Other names on the list, though, like “Elizabeth Besana” are little more than infallible leads into still more California South papers, all of which are nonsense, of course. It is a safe bet that every single publishing venue that features any of these is a completely worthless publication mill, and boy, are there a lot of them out there. “Heidari’s” game seems to be taking a cut of the fees that go into placing papers into these digital dumpsters, so he’s out there inviting submissions far and wide.
And while this is amusing and stupid, it’s also sad. People who stumble across these papers and these sites might take them for something real and have no idea the extent to which people are willing to play let’s-pretend for cash. “Heidari” is a dung beetle who’s making a mockery of actual science in order to turn a few bucks. I take that back; that’s unfair to dung beetles, who actually have a useful purpose in this world. As opposed to this endless list of scammers. . .
