Elsevier parasitology journal retracts paper after finding author made up peer reviewer email addresses
You might just get caught.
That’s what happened recently at Experimental Parasitology, according to the retraction notice for “Entamoeba histolytica: Cloning, expression and evaluation of the efficacy of a recombinant amebiasis cysteine proteinase gene (ACP1) antigen in minipig:”
This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.
This article has been retracted as the author fabricated information during the review process to obtain a favorable review. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.
The paper was by a single author, Guang-Zhi He of the Guiyang College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in China.
Elsevier tells us that one of the journal’s editors became suspicious of the email addresses He gave for possible reviewers. Many of those addresses were directing to web domains in China, which, given that some of the reviewers weren’t from China, added to the evidence that many of them were false.
Prompted by the discrepancies, the editor checked the Elsevier Editorial System profiles of two reviewers, allegedly on opposite sides of the world, and saw that they had been been updated within three minutes of each other.
This seemed highly suspicious, and that’s when we launched a full investigation of the author and his published and “in review” papers. From this the extent of the fraud was determined.
Elsevier tells us that there are several other papers in the process of being retracted.
The author, He, did not respond to our requests for comment.
It seems this experiment in publishing parasitology didn’t work out very well. He might have taken a lesson from another group of email address fakers, also in China, who used said address “to intercept any information that would be sent to the corresponding author.” That paper was also retracted.
Hat tip: Clare Francis