"First you are starting that this issue is fraud, which is a negative attitude. I always would like to give the other part the benefit of the doubt." - Sir Prof. dr. Harry W.M. Steinbusch
Papermills operate by finding weak spots inside journals. Often, the weak spot is the Editor-in-Chief. It is not enough to just look away, the perfect papermill editor must be prepared to accept any bullshit simply because the lying papermilling fraudster is a fellow professor. Even and especially when from Iran or China.
Meet Sir Prof. dr. Harry W.M. Steinbusch – because this is how this Dutch emeritus professor signs his emails.
“Prof. dr. Harry W.M. Steinbusch is appointed as Emeritus Professor in Cellular and Translational Neuroscience at University of Maastricht (UM) in the Netherlands. Currently, he is Coordinator of the China Scholarship Council PhD Program at UM comprising close to 324 PhD students and Strategic Advisor for China policies at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. He is Co-Chair of the IBRO-ECC Mentorship Initiative to train PhD students and postdocs as an international group to write commissioned review articles. He is Founding and Current Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy, current SCI: 3.1, by Elsevier, since 1984. He is co-organizer of the Bright Focus Foundation initiated Alzheimer Fast Track Annual 4 days’ workshop for young career scientists for 23 years. He is Fellow of the Indian Society for Neuroscience. He is Past-President of the Neurotoxicity Society. Founding Director of the European Graduate School of Neuroscience (EURON), starting 1997, a gathering of 8 universities in the EUregio and Founding Director of NENS – Network of European Neuroscience Schools. He has been involved as Founding and Full Director of the School for Mental Health and Neuroscience at Maastricht University.”
It is this Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy which our story is about. The papermill infestation was uncovered by the data integrity sleuth Mu Yang, behavioural neuroscientist at the Columbia University in USA.
More recently, Mu caused a retraction of an entire Springer book by Hari and Aruna Sharma. I must admit, the Sharmas were the most bizarre case of research fraud I ever wrote about. Trust me, this means something. Read for yourself:
Hari Shanker & Aruna, a YouTube influencer couple in Sweden. With or without Rudolph the Red-Faced Liar. And with Anca and Dafin, two totally innocent and upright Romanians. Pushing pig brain juice an SS Nazi invented. You won’t find a better story for Christmas!
There are many other cases. It is not even the first journal Mu tried to clean from papermills. The Springer-published German society journal Naunyn-Schmiedebergs Archives of Pharmacology was previously exposed by Smut Clyde as an outlet for Chinese papermills. Then, the Editor-in-Chief banned submissions from China, issued a set of new rules for quality control, and ended up accepting masses of papermill fraud from Egypt, Pakistan and Iran, as Mu Yang found out. Many of these papers are now retracted following her notification to the editor. Read here:
“In the various excellent texts on paper mills the question is discussed why Naunyn-Schmiedebergs Archives of Pharmacology has become a target for fake papers. I oppose the assumption that we simply want to fill pages with pseudo-scientific content. We actually look for quality and good science.” – Prof Dr Roland Seifert, Editor-in-Chief
Mu Yang uses the ImageTwin software as technical tool and comments on PubPeer as Dysdera arabisenen. She found a lot in Journal of chemical neuroanatomy.
In January 2023, the neuroscience sleuth reported this Chinese paper to Sir Harry:
Basically, Figure 6 has been stolen from Cen et al 2020, there are no common authors. A clear case of plagiarism. Sir Harry decided to investigate and wrote to the corresponding author Shengxi Meng, deputy chief physician of Shanghai Sixth People’s Hospital:
“Before asking the publisher officially to delete your paper I would like to give you the opportunity to explain this mistake.”
Meng explained that he used Cen et al images “to standardize the picture frame format for SEM” (bold his), and then disaster struck:
“After we finished our animal experiment and sorted out experimental data, some images were suddenly damaged because our work computer was infected with a virus. This resulted in the wrong naming of some images. Even the SEMs of hippocampus in the reference article and the images made by our experiment were mixed together. It was so bad that the names of these reference images were muddled with the names of our actual images names. Unfortunately we did not find this mistake at that time. As a result, when we submitted paper and uploaded images to your journal, we should have uploaded SEM images made by ourselves, but uploaded SEM images of the reference articles”
Meng also proposed an Erratum. But he of course understood that no idiot will fall for that silly lie, so he suggested “to withdraw the paper voluntarily and express apologies for the trouble caused to your journal due to our mistake. “
Sir Harry however was most forthcoming:
“May I start wishing you and your team a happy New Year in the Year of the Rabbit. I hope this year will bring you all you expected in the life and career also for your team. I also would like to thank you for your response and the issue related to your paper in which there were duplicated of pictures also used in Nature Communications. Your suggestion is fully in line with my proposal that we will publish an erratum in which you provide not only one new picture but the entire changed figure 6.”
In January 2023, I wrote to Sir Harry, wondering how he can accept such a fraudulent explanation and offer a fraudulent Erratum. He replied:
“First you are starting that this issue is fraud, which is a negative attitude. I always would like to give the other part the benefit of the doubt. Basically, your mail is rather insulting. I have checked the response of the author who did some fraud actions and I downplayed this to mistakes. Now you are mentioning that the erratum they are going to submit is also based on fraud data. Basically, in the erratum they must show publicly that the previous figures will be retracted and replaced by new data. If they are correct, I cannot judge but I think for these authors publish an erratum should be embarrassing and will be accompanied with a letter to the readership as well. I hope this clears this important matter for you and shows other potential authors to better look carefully to their published data.”
But then, Sir Harry decided not to embarrass Meng even with an Erratum.
Mu Yang reported many papers to Sir Harry. Here is a set of three, by a certain Iranian professor named Nahid Aboutaleb, who has currently 10 papers on PubPeer, one was retracted in April 2023. The only good news is that probably no animals suffered for that fake nonsense, as the studies are completely made-up, likely by an Iranian papermill.
“Fig2B appear to be from Fig 4A, B in a previous paper (PMID 26199899)”
The paper Oubari et al 2015 from which Aboutaleb’s gang reused the image was published three years before by a completely different set of authors, also from Iran. Strangely, some other figures from the Oubari paper were also reused in yet another Iranian study, by yet another set of authors in Togha et al 2017. Obviously there is an Iranian papermill behind all of those scholarly publications.
Yet Aboutaleb explained to Sir Harry that it was his co-author Mahin Nikougoftar who “was responsible” and “gave my student wrong picture on accident“. For the next paper, he stated that “my student made this mistake and she have used the same photomicrograph twice accidently“:
Worth noting – when in January 2023 Sir Harry was originally alerted by Mu Yang to that Hessari et al 2002 paper (and another fake one from Iran, Jamali-Raeufy et al 2020) the Editor-in-Chief sounded very determined. He described the issues as “potential fraud of data” (recall him berating me for just this), and announced:
“I have confronted the two authors […] I will let you have to response; it will be a full withdraw anyway.”
But because Aboutaleb declared that “I feel extremely ashamed” and “I am mortified to have done this and I will check all the articles in the future to prevent such mistakes“, Sir Harry wrote in January 2023:
“Dear Dr. Aboutaleb,
We have started to further evaluate your papers and received even more mistakes. Here are other papers from this PI that are flagged on Pubpeer:
Of course, for the future we will not accept anymore papers from your group, one mistake is possible but 7 papers shows that your lab is not to our standard. We are considering two options, first all figures which are mistaken should be replaced by new ones and all these figures will be collected in one erratum. If you cannot change the figures, it will be deleted or the entire publication will be withdrawn. You can start already preparing with this process. More will be follow, there are simply too many so-called mistakes.
Best regards, to you and all your students.
Sir Prof. dr. Harry W.M. Steinbusch“
Instead of the announced “full withdraw”, all these papers were not even corrected.
Also in the next case, again from Iran, Sir Harry initially announced a retraction.
Fig 7, reused in different experimental context from earlier paper by same group
In January 2023, Sir Harry wrote to the corresponding author, the Iranian professor Mehdi Khaksari (highlight mine):
“In 2022 you have published in our Journal with figures attached. Unfortunately, we have discovered that in some of your figures you have used, the same photomicrographs were used twice and basically this makes your paper not correct. Before asking the publisher officially to delete your paper I would like to give you the opportunity to explain this mistake. I am interested to hear your opinion with the next 5 days and how you prefer we have to handle this matter.”
Khaksari replied that they “re-checked the results and related graphs, all of which were correct” and admitted to “an honest error” which he wanted corrected. But Sir Harry instead informed Khaksari that he has other problematic papers on PubPeer and that there was “another paper of yours with a “mistake” for your group.” This one:
Fig 6, reused in different experimental context from earlier paper by same group
Khaksari insisted “We think that using this image is neither duplicate nor fraud” but offered to “delete” the duplicated image. Sir Harry was satisfied and wrote to Khaksari:
“I double checked your figure and indeed this specific figure fulfils solely the description to be used for further analysis. Therefor I would suggest we leave this as it is and close this file. I only would like to mention that if you use a figure twice in the future you must ask permission by the other journal or mention this in your text legends.”
There were not even corrections.
Mu Yang reported other fake studies to Sir Harry. This, for example, again from Iran, where Smut Clyde joined her with more evidence:
Hoya camphorifolia: “[left] Fig 2A again, Sham panel. [right] Fig 2 from “Quercetin in combination with hyperbaric oxygen therapy synergistically attenuates damage progression in traumatic spinal cord injury in a rat model” (Keyhanifard et al 2023), SG panel.”
“The SCI panel is also the LOVA-2 panel of Fig 2A from “Neuroprotective effects of lovastatin against traumatic spinal cord injury in rats” (Mirzaie et al 2022), while the SCI- panel is “Sham”.”
The Mirzaie et al 2022 paper, published also in Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy, has a different set of Iranian authors and is of course just as fake.
The images from Hassan et al 2021, Mirzaie et al 2022 and Keyhanifard et al 2023 also appeared in a Chinese paper, so it is not clear now if the papermill behind it is Chinese or Iranian. Maybe both?
Hoya camphorifolia: “Note the appearance of the same panels in Fig 2A of “Synergistic neuroprotective effects of hyperbaric oxygen and N-acetylcysteine against traumatic spinal cord injury in rat” (Zhao et al 2021).”
When a papermill discovers an open entry door in a journal (because the Editor-in-Chief is someone like Sir Harry), it keeps pumping its trash in. Eventually, the journal publishes nothing but papermill fraud.
In almost all cases, the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy did nothing except writing strange emails. Here is more, reported to Sir Harry by Mu Yang:
“Fig 6 cont image is identical to Fig 7 T100 images; Fig 6 Vit. C image is identical to Fig 7 T100+Vit. C image”
“Fig 4 Vit. C image is highly similar to Fig 5 T100 image”
The Erratum appeared in April 2023, adding an ethics statement regarding animal experiments and this:
“Following the publication of this article, it has come to our attention that in Fig. 1, the image (E) representing the NO in the brain tissue was accidentally replaced by image (D). In Fig. 5, the image representing the T100 group was accidentally replaced by the Vit. C group image from Fig. 4, and the images in Fig. 7 were accidentally replaced by the images in Figure 6.”
Original photos: Mu Yang on X, Maastricht University.
Elsevier sometimes does remove chief editors who allowed too much papermill trash in. Precondition is that they don’t “own” the journal like the Veziroglu family does with the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, an Elsevier outlet which probably never published a single non-fraudulent paper in its history.
Such editor removal happened to Dirk-Uwe Sauer of Journal of Energy Storage.
And to Sir Harry. On 2 April 2024, Mu Yang was informed by Elsevier executive Gail M. Rodney:
“Harry recently stepped down from the journal. Professor Goran Simic is the new EiC of the journal effective 1 January 2024. I copy him here. We’ll need to check where Harry left off with the previous allegations. Please allow Prof. Simic a few days to retrieve and organize the previous communications, if available. He and the editorial team will also review the current allegations. “
I wrote to Sir Harry on this occasion, since he remains board member as “Founding Editor-in-Chief”, and he wrote back something interesting:
“As as of 1-1-2024 your mail has been handled by the new EiC so please mail him with your questions. I was not allowed to handle this further.“
He is not allowed, interesting.
But it seems, even the new Editor-in-Chief from Croatia, the University of Zagreb professor Goran Simic, can’t stop what Sir Harry started.
This was corrected after Sir Harry left his journal, probably he managed to stick the Corrigendum into the pipeline:
“The authors regret “In Fig. 2, image ‘’a’’ was misplaced inadvertently and now is corrected. The authors declare that this amendment has no impact on results or conclusion”. The authors would like to apologize for any inconvenience caused.”
That despite the fact that Alireza Komaki is a papermiller with a PubPeer record who even coauthored papers with Mohammad Taheri and Soudeh Ghafouri-Fard. Read about them here:
“Fig 4 P0 Dia and P14 Con images overlap”“Fig 7: P7 Ins and P14 Con overlap”
“Overlapping images in Fig 4 and Fig 7”“Fig 5: P7 Ins and P14 Con images overlap”
“Fig 2A P0 Dia image and Fig 6A P0 Con image overalp”
What was Sir Harry thinking, allowing this to happen, despite being repeatedly warned? Does he even understand that Iranian universities are not really about science and learning, but about terror ideology and cadre indoctrination, as well as torture and murder of student protesters? That papermills are not some illegal shadow small-time scam in Iran, but government-protected industry, an integral part of Iranian university system, operating with the purpose to send “highly cited” spies and saboteurs into western societies?
The mess Sir Harry created is huge. But the clean-up started. On 16 May 2024, Mu Yang was informed by Elsevier’s Gail Rodney that several papers have been retracted from the Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy, all reported by her. Note that the first paper claimed WiFi would cause brain damage, and Sir Harry didn’t even lift an eyebrow:
There are sure idiotic EICs out there, however, Elsevier and other publishers also play a dirty role here. They will do anything (and pressure the EICs) to prevent a retraction! Their whole notion of given the authors the benefit of the doubt needs to be stopped, it is way too often in many issues that there is no ‘doubt’, it is pure and simple fraud.
The response from Elsevier in cases of fraud depends on individuals within Elsevier who interact with editor in chief. In my experience the Elsevier representative was totally supportive of dealing effectively with fraudulent work
Poor Sir, he simply couldn’t protect all his rabbits coming out from his papermill rabbit hat in the Rabbit year from being eaten by the evil wolves wandering through the beautiful meadows of “scientific” publishing.
Onto the next editor in chief continuing this practice…
A new method of papermilling is emerging where the lead author adapts and paraphrases sections from several articles with ChatGPT and uses the figures of the original articles with inserting citations. Then they sell the article to numerous people. See the work of, e.g., Qusay Hassan:
I absolutely agree! This possibility came to our minds when we were looking at the work of an Iran-Europe-Canada centred citation and paper cartel that we have been following for a long time. They do this especially in review papers and they cite the works of their own academic gang members in between the texts they produce with AI. This is definitely a very high possibility, but it is very difficult to detect and physically prove.
Exactly, It is difficult to detect unlike, e.g., figure manipulation or tortured phrases. They do not produce any actual research but cite other people’s works and paraphrase the text.
For instance the article titled: “Enhancing smart grid integrated renewable distributed generation capacities: Implications for sustainable energy transformation”
is called an original article yet copies all its figures and uses paraphrased materials from former articles. The authorship and peer-review are extensively manipulated.
or these two articles are duplicated, submitted and published in parallel: same article paraphrased with copied figures.
Under normal circumstances, when an image is received from another source, a review or a research article, it is necessary not only to cite the source but also to obtain permission from the publisher using a copyright form or similar documentation. However, in some of the review articles, we see that the images are only cited to but no copyright permission is provided. While it is correct to both cite and obtain permission, citation only is usually not seen as a big problem unless the publisher objects. However, some articles may not even cite the real sources. For example, as you can see in the PubPeer comments, it is not clear whether some of the figures in this article were created by the authors or received from another source. Since there is no citation, we are supposed to assume that they are the authors’ own drawings or designs, but this is a review article and there are many question marked images (there are also serious questions about citations in this article).
We can easily recognize the figures ourselves, but as mentioned above, the bigger problem now is detecting whether many texts were adapted/paraphrased from other articles with AI or not. For example; you want to write a review article on topic A and you want to increase your citation numbers with this review article. However, you do not have enough knowledge about the subject, nor do you have the time and diligence to read the research studies on the subject. No problem anymore! Collect review articles published in recent years, use AI to create your own article by copying and paraphrasing the different parts of the articles. Now, unnecessarily intersperse previous studies published by yourself or by colleagues in the same citation cartel. If you can get copyright permission to use the images, you can both cite and declare that you have permission. If you do not have permission, you can only cite. If you don’t want to cite, you can post the images without citation, although this is a bit risky. Anyway, here you go! Your new review article draft is ready for submission!
For Better Science 
Well done Mu!
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Ivan Oransky went into a Matthew Stephenson mode, nicking one of my stories after another and making them into Retraction Watch “originals”
Hold on your valuables everyone when Ivan The Watchdog is around.
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There are sure idiotic EICs out there, however, Elsevier and other publishers also play a dirty role here. They will do anything (and pressure the EICs) to prevent a retraction! Their whole notion of given the authors the benefit of the doubt needs to be stopped, it is way too often in many issues that there is no ‘doubt’, it is pure and simple fraud.
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The response from Elsevier in cases of fraud depends on individuals within Elsevier who interact with editor in chief. In my experience the Elsevier representative was totally supportive of dealing effectively with fraudulent work
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Moo! … and I mean that in the bestest of possible ways!
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Poor Sir, he simply couldn’t protect all his rabbits coming out from his papermill rabbit hat in the Rabbit year from being eaten by the evil wolves wandering through the beautiful meadows of “scientific” publishing.
Onto the next editor in chief continuing this practice…
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A new method of papermilling is emerging where the lead author adapts and paraphrases sections from several articles with ChatGPT and uses the figures of the original articles with inserting citations. Then they sell the article to numerous people. See the work of, e.g., Qusay Hassan:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=ciHdVdoAAAAJ
https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=36969202300
Then the rest is as you mentioned, i.e., using the weakness of the editorials.
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I absolutely agree! This possibility came to our minds when we were looking at the work of an Iran-Europe-Canada centred citation and paper cartel that we have been following for a long time. They do this especially in review papers and they cite the works of their own academic gang members in between the texts they produce with AI. This is definitely a very high possibility, but it is very difficult to detect and physically prove.
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Exactly, It is difficult to detect unlike, e.g., figure manipulation or tortured phrases. They do not produce any actual research but cite other people’s works and paraphrase the text.
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But are these articles than review papers or research papers? Because for the latter, how can they then publish it if they use figures from others?
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For instance the article titled: “Enhancing smart grid integrated renewable distributed generation capacities: Implications for sustainable energy transformation”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213138824001899
is called an original article yet copies all its figures and uses paraphrased materials from former articles. The authorship and peer-review are extensively manipulated.
or these two articles are duplicated, submitted and published in parallel: same article paraphrased with copied figures.
GIS-based multi-criteria analysis for solar, wind, and biomass energy potential: A case study of Iraq with implications for climate goals, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590123024004675
Evaluation of solar and biomass perspectives using geographic information system – The case of Iraq regions https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148124005287
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Under normal circumstances, when an image is received from another source, a review or a research article, it is necessary not only to cite the source but also to obtain permission from the publisher using a copyright form or similar documentation. However, in some of the review articles, we see that the images are only cited to but no copyright permission is provided. While it is correct to both cite and obtain permission, citation only is usually not seen as a big problem unless the publisher objects. However, some articles may not even cite the real sources. For example, as you can see in the PubPeer comments, it is not clear whether some of the figures in this article were created by the authors or received from another source. Since there is no citation, we are supposed to assume that they are the authors’ own drawings or designs, but this is a review article and there are many question marked images (there are also serious questions about citations in this article).
We can easily recognize the figures ourselves, but as mentioned above, the bigger problem now is detecting whether many texts were adapted/paraphrased from other articles with AI or not. For example; you want to write a review article on topic A and you want to increase your citation numbers with this review article. However, you do not have enough knowledge about the subject, nor do you have the time and diligence to read the research studies on the subject. No problem anymore! Collect review articles published in recent years, use AI to create your own article by copying and paraphrasing the different parts of the articles. Now, unnecessarily intersperse previous studies published by yourself or by colleagues in the same citation cartel. If you can get copyright permission to use the images, you can both cite and declare that you have permission. If you do not have permission, you can only cite. If you don’t want to cite, you can post the images without citation, although this is a bit risky. Anyway, here you go! Your new review article draft is ready for submission!
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COVID origins : Peter Daszak has friends in high places…………..
https://www.newsweek.com/inside-fauci-morens-coronavirus-emails-1904099
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