Smut Clyde takes a brief respite from all that science fraud, to show you the comedy side of and impersonation plagiarism. Maybe less funny for those directly affected by theft of intellectual property, laptops and even identity, but we others can lean back and enjoy the hilarious antics of a wannabe scientist, engineer, neurosurgeon, film-star, Olympic shooter and sometimes even a young lady – Matthew J Stephenson.

For extra fun, i contacted him about his obsessive-compulsive theft of other people’s research papers. Instead of an explanation, Stephenson announced to steal even more:

“…there have been multiple papers where I haven’t been credited that I’m happy to link you to if you’re interested“

To his PubPeer critics he had this to say:

“Those people are idiots.“

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Fuckaroo Fanboi (it’s not brain surgery)

By Smut Clyde

I cannot pull my eyes away from this paper in MDPI ‘Software‘.

Matthew James Stephenson A Differential Datalog Interpreter Software (2023) doi: 10.3390/software2030020 

It has an engrossing backstory… two backstories, in fact, for two parallel universes appear to have converged and co-existed for a while in a state of quantum superposition.

The manuscript had been written by Bruno Rucy Carneiro, Merlin Kramer & Kalmer Apinis in one time-line and by Matthew J. Stephenson in the other. This quantum duality left its traces in the form of two preprints in the arXiv repository, identical apart from trivial details of authorship. Note that the Rucy Carneiro version was uploaded in August 2023, ten days later than the Stephenson version.

Curiously, their identicality extends to a shared Reference [25], referring to a Github thread in which Rucy Carneiro and Kramer document the progress with their software.

• [25] Bruno Rucy and Merlin Kramer. 2023. https://github.com/brurucy/shapiro. Accessed: 2023-05-31.

Further evidence attests to Rucy Carneiro et al.’s ownership of the whole project. However, they circulated their document for feedback before lodging it in arXiv, which gave Stephenson an opportunity to claim-jump.

Then the double wave-function collapsed and both versions disappeared from arXiv in the worlds-colliding chaos. The Rucy Carneiro version was deleted in obligatory response to a bogus copyright claim; the Stephenson version, on account of a “violation of author policy”, i.e. the repository moderators recognised that he stole someone else’s work rather than writing it himself. How copyright infringement works in these circumstances is anyone’s guess.¹ Stephenson’s preprint only lingers at ResearchGate (with emergency back-up copies at ScienceOpen, SSRN, ViXra, etc., etc.), and of course as his submission to MDPI.

Our man has a history of this curious behavior. His CV includes a self-published essay on “Analysis of the electron star system and its holographic dual” (available through Amazon, £35.33). The back page helpfully provides a description of the author.

“Matthew James Stephenson is a Finnish-American alumni of Stanford University. He enrolled at medical school as a teenager, where he maintained a perfect GPA. He is an award winning app developer and has scaled enterprise software for numerous companies at Silicon Valley.”

PubPeer contributor Leptogaster flavipes identified the book as “strongly similar to Kaplis, N. (2013). Holographic quantum liquids (Doctoral dissertation, Oxford University, UK).”

Tracking down the sources of Stephenson’s other ventures into “the Higher Obscurities” (Bramah, 1928), such as “Metallic and Insulating Phases in Two-Dimensional Strongly-Coupled Field Theories With a Gravitational Dual“, is left as an exercise for the reader.

HINT: there is wholesale piracy of work by Sašo Grozdanov and the Oxford group. Consider ‘Hydrodynamic Dispersion Relations at Finite Coupling‘, another arXiv work-in-progress from Grozdanov, Starinets & Tadić. Somehow the third revision acquired Matthew J. Stephenson as the first author, obliging the actual authors to upload a fourth revision that simply reverted to the second, non-Stephenson version. It may be that arXiv relies upon the honesty and integrity of contributors.

Stephenson is working hard to create an alternative universe in which he is an established scientist. Envious, perhaps, of the high social esteem and even higher remuneration that academics famously enjoy. In fact he wants his Scientist persona to be not only a renowned computer scientist and quantum theoretician, but also a neurosurgeon. Possibly a test pilot and rock star too. It might help if someone advised him that Buckaroo Banzai (with his adventures across the 8^th dimension) is a fictional character.

On the other hand, I am open to the possibility that Matthew Stephenson is also a fictitious character, from an unwritten satirical novel (a posthumous collaboration between Malcolm Bradbury and J. G. Ballard), who fell through the tenuous barrier separating the fictive realm from what we jokingly call “reality”.

Stephenson’s Goofle Scholar entry emphasises the neurosurgery facet of his career. 60538 citations, 42,938 of them prior to 2018! An h-index of 120! It turns out, though, that Scholar allows you take credit for anyone‘s papers – relying again upon honesty and integrity – and our man decided to claim the extensive academic career of neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler as his own.

https://t.co/5OXZ3rQoaB pic.twitter.com/B0FSaLWXg9

— 🧙‍♂️Matthew M.D. Stephenson (@PoemOfFire) October 4, 2023

Stephenson does in fact have a neurosurgery publication trail. Behold “Metastatic Seeding From a Gastrointestinal Neoplasia in a Pituitary Adenoma: A Case Report and Literature Review” (Gariépy & Champagne, 2023) – presenting a rare turducken of a tumor. Those authors chose to publish at Cureus. Now it happens that Cureus trust Stephenson with peer-review responsibilities (believing his claim to have expertise in Neurological Surgery, from Feinberg School of Medicine this time), which gave him early access to the Gariépy / Champagne manuscript. So it comes as no surprise that the manuscript reappeared in Elsevier, with the text lightly rephrased but with the same MRI scans.

Matthew Stephenson Adenoma replacement due to invasion of a metastatic Mass: A case report and literature review Interdisciplinary Neurosurgery (2023) doi: 10.1016/j.inat.2023.101748

Stephenson explained in PubPeer comments that his version of the case-study wasn’t stolen, because the qualified neurosurgeons misidentified the tumor (according to his interpretation of their observations) – so he is entitled to swipe their images, clinical description and literature review, and present them as his own. The editors of Interdisciplinary Neurosurgery have been informed.

“The “authors” at Gariépy & Champagne had no concept about what happened to the patient as invasion of the adenoma by a metastatic mass which led to replacement of the primary tumor by the new invasive one that was confirmed endocrinologically before and histopathologically after surgery. The diffs referenced at this comment are not identical and distinct.“

Stephenson, August 2023

“Can you say more about the clinical utility of misdiagnosing patients? What you linked describes a diagnosis for the disease as a “composite tumor”. This is a misdiagnosis and; if replicated could cause complications at other patients. But again; this is obvious. Can you say more about your background?“

Stephenson, August 2023

For further hilarity, a third version of the case-study exists. “Prolactinoma in a Patient with a Primary Adenoma” is ostensibly written by Celine Chalas (Department of Oncology, Stanford University), who doesn’t exist, but who uses the email address matthewjstephenson@icloud.com (Stephenson also holds the copyright).

This redaction is shorter and lacks Figures. It is hard to imagine why Stephenson paid a low-life predatory publisher to host a twice-plagiarised paper; if the idea was to promote himself through citations, bad luck, for this is (after all) an OMICS journal-shaped garbage scow, and any citations were stripped out.

Our man’s other published contribution to neurosurgery is an Obituary for an illustrious Finnish pioneer in the field. Again, in Elsevier:

Matthew Stephenson Obituary for Juha Hernesniemi, M.D., 1947–2023 World Neurosurgery (2023) doi: 10.1016/j.wneu.2023.07.082 

The prose is an over-ripe rodomontade, relying on pomposity and extensive use of Roget’s Thesaurus to disguise the original sources,² while the photographs are recycled and uncredited. The sincerity of this eulogy is in doubt: Stephenson exploited the death of Juha Hernesniemi as an excuse to pimp his own earlier plagiarism.

All this evolved inexorably into a Whackyweedia page, contributed by a ‘Sphenopetroclival’ to extoll Stephenson’s accomplishments and to regurge his fabulations. The entry was swiftly nominated for deletion, and Sphenopetroclival’s Talk page degenerated into heated arguments with the hierarchy of Wikieditors about the subject’s notability, punctuated by bans for being a sockpuppet. Wiki sockpuppet battles are the best.

Apparently it is not enough to have published papers to be notable (skipping over questions of authorship): there must also be evidence that people read and cite them. Nor is it enough to have an IMDB page recording one’s involvement in movies as an extra or as Assistant to the Assistant Fluffer. Anyone can set up an IMDB account and enter whatever claims they like… in what is becoming a recurring theme, the system relies upon the honesty and integrity of contributors. Perhaps this blogpost will make Stephenson notable enough!

To cut a long story even longer: Stephenson is not affiliated to the Stanford Computer Sciences Department, where Fredrik Kjolstad is not his Ph.D advisor; nor is he a rising star of Stanford Neurosurgery.

Contra his ResearchGate self-hagiography, he is not employed as a neurosurgeon at Barrow Neurological Institute, after three years as a Consultant at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton (in parallel with that imaginary education at Stanford).

Nor is he at Caltech or MIT or Northwestern University… hence the student email account from University of Washington. The one certification Matthew does have is an open warrant for his arrest in California, on a felony charge of identity theft (case 22-SF-003730-A).

The National Provider Identifier registration as ‘Dr. MATTHEW JAMES STEPHENSON MD‘ that featured on his aspirational Wiki entry is nothing but an unverified, fraudulent self-report (the NPI system relies upon the honesty and integrity of contributors). And if he takes WebMD up on their offer to add him to their spamming service, that will not make him medically qualified either.

There used to an entry in the “MIT Confessions” Faceborg page in which students were warned against a certain fabulist and petty swindler who hangs around university campuses (campora?) pretending to be faculty, gaining students’ confidence until he steals cameras or laptops or credit-cards.

The FB comment was taken down in response to a campaign of weaponised whining. Websites reporting Stephenson’s depredations were also expunged (along with Stephenson’s own blog reporting his perspective on the depredations while defaming the victims). Fortunately archived copies remain:

• “Please beware of Matthew J. Stephenson“
• “His name is Matthew Stephenson, and he’s been stalking and harassing my friend Sheep for two and a half years.”

There are hints in Stephenson’s Twiddle account that he has progressed a little from his Medical Maestro cosplay and is now developing an Olympic Athlete character, in sharpshooting … or cycling… or conceivably a new competitive sport that requires you to do both at once. Even so, the white-coat dress-up fantasies are not healthy and it is wrong for the editors of Software to encourage him.

I stole information from various Twitter accounts: @JulesJacobs5, @joellejay, @brurucyy.

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1. NEWS FLASH! ArXiv have finally reinstated the legitimate version of “A Differential Datalog Interpreter”. I would inform the editors of Software, but they do not reply to my email warnings that the version they’re hosting is in violation of copyright.

2. It’s OK for me to be a pompous git, as I have training and experience and a Teutonic background.

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CODA:

There was not enough space for the “FutureGadget-Labs” sideshow.

The context here is “Steins;Gate” – a Japanese computer game / manga / anime tie-in, centred around a club-house of misfits who bond over the useless gadgetry they invent. The promotion campaign for the anime adaptation included a website and bulletin board purportedly run by the fictional club-house. So Stephenson cloned the website for self-advertisement purposes and inserted himself in place of the group’s leader, Rintaro Okabe. Perhaps this displays a glimmer of self-awareness, for Okabe is a socially-maladroit self-styled Insane Mad Scientist with a penchant for grandiloquent pronouncements.

The other individuals whom Stephenson drags into his stalky fantasy world are a Stanford Computer Science researcher (supposedly the advisor on his imaginary PhD); and the Editor-in-Chief of Interdisciplinary Neurosurgery. This is the sort of silly-buggers that gives us ordinary decent high-functioning psychopaths a bad name.

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