An engineering journal has retracted an article that was posted on a website claiming to sell author positions. The retraction comes nearly two years after we reported on the website and a whistleblower informed the journal.
The study, “On the dynamics of an ultra-fast-rotating-induced piezoelectric cantilevered nanodisk surrounded by viscoelastic foundation,” appeared in Mechanics Based Design of Structures and Machines in December 2020. It listed researchers at Sichuan University of Science and Engineering in China as authors. The article has been cited five times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The study was retracted on March 16, 2023. The retraction notice stated:
Since publication, concerns have been raised about the authorship of the article. When approached for an explanation, the authors have been unable to verify their original data.
It has also come to our attention that the full authorship list for this manuscript were [sic] changed during the submission and publication process. As determining authorship is core to the integrity of published work and given our concerns regarding the data, we are therefore retracting this article.
The authors listed in this publication have been informed.
The study was among several posted on the Iranian website Teziran in 2021. The site has claimed to sell authorship positions for scientific papers under review in various journals.
As we previously reported, an anonymous whistleblower who goes by the name Artemisia Stricta identified articles from a cached version of Teziran after reading our post, and informed the editors and publishers of the journals in which the papers appeared.
In September 2021, Artemisia sent an email to Corina Sandu, editor in chief of Mechanics Based Design of Structures and Machines, writing, in part:
As I am sure you will agree, the listing of authorship for sale is a major red flag, and, in many cases, is accompanied by outright falsification of the article for scalability of authorship sales.
The large number of authors certainly seems to indicate that some positions of authorship were sold. Are you able to review the point during the review process when the authors were added? If any were added after initial submission, this would be a strong indication of authorship manipulation, which may constitute grounds for retraction. Of course, it is also possible that authorship was sold prior to submission. In any case, I hope that you will investigate this matter.
Sandu eventually replied, saying that she had forwarded the concern to the journal’s publisher. Over the next few months, Artemisia’s attempts to follow up about the investigation yielded either assurances that the matter was still being investigated, or no reply.
In reply to an email from Retraction Watch, a spokesperson for Taylor and Francis, the publisher of Mechanics Based Design of Structures and Machines, said of the March retraction:
After concerns were raised about the article we conducted an investigation and found substantial authorship changes had been made. We reached out to the authors to confirm their individual contributions and also to provide the raw data and original figures for the article. Unfortunately the authors were unable to verify their original data and did not respond to further emails. Given our concerns regarding the data and authorship of the paper, we retracted this article. Since the publication of this article we have substantially improved our processes for authorship changes and, should significant authorship changes occur in the future, this would indicate that investigation is needed by the journal’s editorial team, with assistance from our publishing ethics and integrity team.
The spokesperson also clarified that Artemisia’s email brought this issue to the publisher’s attention, although the paper was only retracted after they had conducted their own investigation.
When asked why the investigation took as long as it did, the spokesperson said:
As with all investigations we must conduct due diligence and collect required evidence to ensure the outcome of an investigation is fair and unbiased. As a result, some cases take longer than others to resolve.
Neither Sandu nor Mingjun Yang, the senior author of the paper, responded to an email from Retraction Watch.
None of the remaining papers posted on Teziran about which Artemisia raised concerns have been retracted or bear any indication that they are under investigation. The papers are:
In reply to an email from Retraction Watch about the recent retraction, Artemisia wrote:
In September 2021, I notified the journal that authorship of this paper had been listed for sale on Teziran. Given both the clear indication of misconduct, the severity of the allegations, and the comparative simplicity of the investigation (i.e., establishing that authors had been added following submission), I cannot understand why it took almost two years to retract the paper. It seems to me that journals ought to maintain easily-accessible records of when authors were added during the review process.
The scariest thing about this retraction is that the paper was only caught by a fluke. WayBack Machine caches sites irregularly, which makes it likely that other papers weren’t caught simply because their auction wasn’t cached. In light of this concern, I would be curious to know what steps Mechanics Based Design of Structures and Machines (and, more generally, Taylor & Francis) is doing in order to identify other potentially-affected papers (e.g., searching for other cases of late-stage author addition or investigating other papers by the same authors).
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