Professor Zhao’s paper mill of fraud
A cancer research professor in China runs a paper mill, sources claim he sells first authorships for a bribe. Problem for his customers: the peer-reviewed papers they pay for, contain fake data.
Category: Smut Clyde
Yubing Sun: contaminated science, Synchrotron fraud and citation scam
Smut Clyde and TigerBB8 investigate another case of nanotechnology research in China. Connected teams of authors pretended to work on cleaning up the environment of radioactive pollution, and instead released a toxic sludge of fraudulent data and citations.
Colonel Cai, his postdoc Shen and the Weapons of Mass Fabrication
Smut Clyde and Tiger BB8 uncover a Chinese network which spreads over two cities and uses same stash of fake data to keep inventing nanoparticle or TCM-based cures for diabetic brain damage and other diseases.
Nanodandruff and synthetic spectroscopy
The story of two data fabricators and Elsevier regulars, Sudheer Khan and Ali Fakhri. Smut Clyde brings them together in this new guest post about nanotechnology
Texas Photoshop Massacre (in Nature)
The team around the paediatric oncologist Nabil Ahmed at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, discovered a way to engineer T-leukocytes to bypass the blood-brain barrier at attack otherwise untreatable brain cancers. Their amazing technology to get this published in Nature was brazenly insolent data fakery.
Frontiers: a danger for public health?
Frontiers is a somewhat unconventional open access publisher, which likes to have it both ways: playing scientific elite while accepting almost anything from paying customers. My regular contributor Smut Clyde will tell you below how some anti-vaccine scare-mongers managed to sneak in some rather dangerous works thanks to Frontiers’ unofficial “we don’t judge, we just charge” quasi-policy.
Guilty pleasures of meditating with Deepak Chopra
Smut Clyde will take you on a meditative Ayurvedic trip where the most respectable of research institutions and their world-renowned academics were caught dancing with the Guru Deepak Chopra himself. Famous cardiologist and medical writer Eric Topol and the Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn were just two most prominent US academics listed on Chopra’s Panchakarma clinical trial.
The adventures of Gui and Hui in Nano-land
The hero of this new nano-malfeasance story by Smut Clyde is another Chinese Photoshop-enthusiast, Rijun Gui, a “specially recruited professor” at Qingdao University in China. There is also a female lead, Gui’s wife and colleague Hui Jin. Almost 30 of their papers, mostly published in Elsevier journals, are being discussed on and by PubPeer, one was already retracted by the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Dr Tong’s illusions of nanotechnology
My regular contributor Smut Clyde will now lead you back on a trip to the magic world of “Nanotechnology”, where tiny particles are created, sometimes in real chemical laboratories, sometimes in the fake world of the Photoshop. Dong Ge Tong, of Chengdu University of Technology in China, is not just a photoshopper, but also a true philosopher.
Tarantino & Finelli: i plagiatori di Napoli
Giovanni Tarantino andC armine Finelli are two medical plagiarists from Naples in Italy, who became infamous after one of them was caught having stolen the work of a US colleague he was peer reviewing. In other cases, the two Napolitans were even too lazy to plagiarise. They simply republished their already plagiarised “works” several times, even as book chapters. The journals were informed, but most couldn’t care less.
