Friday, November 24, 2017

Four papers retracted for fake peer review



Four papers retracted for fake peer review

False email addresses were supplied

On November 17, four papers published by researchers from Thiruvananthapuram-based national labs were retracted by journal publisher Frontiers owing to fake peer reviews. Three papers are from CSIR-National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology (NIIST) and the fourth is from ICAR-Central Tuber Research Institute (CTCRI). The papers were published between August 2015 and October 2017 in three journals.

Review of manuscripts by researchers working in the same area of specialisation allows for critical evaluation of the manuscript prior to publication in journals. Some journal publishers ask authors to suggest reviewers for their papers.

There have been many instances where the suggested reviewers may be real persons but the email addresses are fakes. So the manuscript comes back to the author or the author’s friends who give the paper a glowing review.

The authors of the four papers had shared personal or non-institutional email addresses of the supposed peer reviewers to manipulate the system.

Common author

S. Nishanth Kumar, who was a post-doc at NIIST, is the only author common to all four papers; he is the first author of three papers and a corresponding author of two papers. Dr. B.S. Dileep Kumar, who heads the Agroprocessing and Natural Products Division at NIIST, is a corresponding author of three papers.

According to Retraction Watch blog, routine check on another manuscript submitted by Nishanth Kumar and other authors led to the discovery of faked emails. The manuscript was rejected and further scrutiny led to the discovery of fake emails supplied for the four papers that have now been retracted.

“Nishanth Kumar had done his doctorate from ICAR-Central Tuber Research Institute (CTCRI), Thiruvananthapuram, and joined NIIST as a post-doc. He was not a permanent scientist at NIIST. He was doing reasonably good work and the papers are of reasonable quality. I don’t know why he did this. Now, we have not been able to trace him,” says Dr. Ajay Ghosh, Director of NIIST.

Worked independently

“He was a Science & Engineering Research Board (SERB) fellow and working as a temporary employee but equivalent to a scientist. He was working independently. He had contacts with many researchers and he suggested the names of reviewers,” says Dr. Dileep Kumar of NIIST who was monitoring the group’s work.

“I made a mistake by not suggesting the names of reviewers. But till this happened, we never doubted him... In the paper published in May this year, he has given CTCRI as his affiliation though he is not associated with the institute. The co-author of that paper Dr. C. Mohandas of CTCRI retired four years ago. One of the reviewers for a paper is his PhD co-guide who retired from CTCRI nearly five years ago.

“I have been working as a CSIR scientists for last 26 years and have only four years to retire. This has come as a black mark at the fag end of my career. The work carried out by eight students who worked for two years has gone to waste.”


Regards

Pralhad Jadhav  

Senior Manager @ Knowledge Repository  
Khaitan & Co 



Twitter Handle | @Pralhad161978

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