This post was earlier cross-posted at Leonid Schneider's site, hence the unfrivolous tone. The version there is improved by Leonid's editing and frame story, and cartoon, which I am stealing here.
Please admire these single-use burner Yahoo identities, used once each for submitting a manuscript to the Journal of the Balkan Union of Oncology (J. BUOn), then consigned to the realms of darkness and silence as soon as it was accepted. The list evokes a sense of mortality and the tragic brevity of existence. Their creators have confidence in their capacity to span an endless succession of delightful personae, and "DanyelSsche" is the only one I have seen recycled to submit a second manuscript.
TBarnebesaull@yahoo.com sporusac@yahoo.com RichieWattsfdv@yahoo.com BrattinOdod@yahoo.com RLakeshiattebe@yahoo.com StaciNcrod@yahoo.com MMadalynywa@yahoo.com AlistadLhos@yahoo.com DCassienne@yahoo.com KNanceylse@yahoo.com DanyelSsche@yahoo.com RBellengob@yahoo.com
One might expect the editors to wonder why Yi Xiao (for instance) opted to communicate with them through the mouthpiece of "EmileJohnstongln@yahoo.com" -- especially when the same author had used a more convincingly institutional e-address for two other papers, immediately before and after in the journal's pagination. On the other hand, more situationally-aware editors would have noticed the same Figures turning up again and again in manuscripts purportedly contributed by otherwise-unrelated research teams (to say nothing of the journal's peer-review corps who were equally oblivious to the repetitions). On the prehensile tail, nor were editorial suspicions aroused by the tsunami of authors asking Santa Claus for "Urgent changes to their publications" for Xmas (replacing one or more bogus Figures with something less obviously fake).
The editors spent the festive season dashing around behind the scenes like one-armed puppeteers, tasked with making Stealth Revisions. For a series of J. BUOn papers had inspired Indigofera Tanganyikensis and Elisabeth Bik and Tabebuia Rosea to comment upon their problematic Figures, at the PubPeer platform for post-publication peer-review. It looks like people read PubPeer (which will be gratifying for the site's founders)... Ninja Corrigenda followed, and so much has been swept under the carpet in the J. BUOn editorial office that it must now resemble a scale model of the Himalayas.
Right now, welcome to the first papermill of 2021! Yes, there is an on-line spreadsheet. I propose to approach the topic indirectly, circuitously (as is the custom of my people). A second introductory theme is 'hipster ethnopharmacology'. We have already met the first related theme: Yahoo e-addresses and their tragic ephemerality. These provide a useful clue to provenance, by the way: a paper might be papermill-sourced even if the corresponding e-address is plausibly related to the nominal author's name, but if the address is (say) "JereCummingsjux@yahoo.com", then the real author is seeking financial compensation rather than recognition.
The academic speciality of ethopharmacology is flourishing, if the multitude of journals serving it are any guide. If a plant has any place in any folk pharmacopoeia, sooner or later it will take its turn under the microscope (or more accurately, inside the chromatograph), with eager researchers isolating and characterising its active ingredients. Or failing that, isolating any secondary metabolites distinguishing it from other plants. For evolution, and the advantage that comes in the evolutionary race from not being eaten, has taught plants to deter potential consumers by packing their leaves and fruit and roots with molecules that are sand in the metabolic machinery of herbivorous mammals (and birds, insects, molluscs). The corollary follows (as corollaries are wont to do) that these secondary metabolites must have some therapeutic applications. It remain, then, to test each molecule in vitro or in animal models of all possible medical conditions (since folk-medicine indicative categories like "excess black bile" or "imbalance of qi energy" are not as helpful as one might think).
Oncological candidates are especially helpful, for it goes without saying that phytochemicals designed to deter animal consumption will also cripple the previously-unchecked proliferation of cancer cells. The industry has not yet exhausted all combinations of "phytochemical X" and "vat-grown cancer cell-line Y". Perhaps the papermills can help!
Here "X" comes from a chemical cavalcade including Ambrosin, Baicalein, chrysoeriol, davanone, Eriodictyol, flavokawain-B, Geraniol, helenalin, Imperatorin, Juglone, Kaempferol, Lycopsamine, α-mangostin, Murrayanine, Norwogonin, Oridonin, Pleuromutilin, Royleanone, Sugiol, Tangeretin, Ursolic acid, Voacangine, Wogonin, Xanthohumol and Zingiberene. These are variously classified as chalcones, diterpenes, deterpenoids, flavones, flavonoids, sesquiterpene lactones, terpenoids etc., for it is not enough just to be an 'alkaloid' these days. Coca-coline and Yoyodeine are not on the list, as researchers collectively lacked the commercial nous to sell naming rights for this molecular abecedarium.
Some of them are systematic reviews, or an inclusion in some Introductory Context section padded out with vaguely relevant stuff where an author had time for a G**gle Search but not enough time to read the hits. But there are so far 50 papers in my spreadsheet citing Hua et al (2018). Sometimes to exemplify concepts and methods which Hua et al never mentioned -- the quantification of RNA with PCR; or ROS and mitochondrial membrane potential levels. They did mention cell-cycle arrest and quantifying apoptosis with flow-cytometry, but hardly as pioneers, so it is remarkable that so many authors independently chose to use them as the reference description. In a standardised way. Often involving covers-lips.
It's conceivable that a computer virus inserted itself into 50 authors' word-processing software and copy-pasted certain paragraphs into whatever manuscripts were half-written at the time. We should also consider the alternative explanation, that a papermill is churning out the product by sticking to templates, changing the phrases just enough to avoid triggering automated plagiarism detectors.
It is hard to choose where to begin with this sprawling continuum, where shared graphic elements link any paper to many other papers. Western-Blot bands change protein ID and lane conditions to turn up in another WB. Flow-cytometry histograms are modular; the peaks can be taken apart and reassembled in new arrangements to demonstrate entirely different claims. Flow-cytometry scatter-plots gain or lose points. Fluorescent-stained panoramas of cell cultures, color-coded by their post-treatment viability, yield enlarged details to illustrate different cell-lines and different treatments.
Aphidicolin, Artemisinin: surprisingly similar effects
It is a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria, and I need to be reminded that "however entrancing it is to wander unchecked through a garden of bright images, are we not enticing your mind from another subject of almost equal importance?" To remove this paralyzing excess of choices, I will pick the next few cherries from the narrow focus of the 50 papers of the Daidzein corpus.
The Daidzein subgenre also reminds us that these molecule / cancer-type / cell-signaling-pathway MadLibs do get cited (with the usual caveat that citations do not imply a readership, when it is enough for a title and abstract to show up in authors' searches for corroborative detail to lend verisimilitude to their otherwise bald and unconvincing narratives). The 71 citations for Hua et al. are an outlier, riding on the coat-tails of a template, but "Baicalein induces apoptosis in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma cells through modulation of the PI3K/Akt pathway", "Anticancer and apoptotic activities of oleanolic acid are mediated through cell cycle arrest and disruption of mitochondrial membrane potential in HepG2 human hepatocellular carcinoma cells" and "Genistein induced anticancer effects on pancreatic cancer cell lines involves mitochondrial apoptosis, G 0 /G 1 cell cycle arrest and regulation of STAT3 signalling pathway" (respectively accruing 67, 56 and 39 citations) hit the same sweet-spot of clickbait citability.
That said, J.BUOn is hardly a high-impact-factor outlet (Impact Factor = 1.695). If the present papermillers confined themselves to its pages, they would lose their already-limited interest to readers. However, they are naturally ambitious to extend further afield. We find more of the implausible Yahoo identities in Medical Science Monitor (33 papers in the spreadsheet), and in Archives of Medical Science (17 papers). I know nothing of these journals except that they're not dominated by papermill persiflage... it may be that a systematic search would reveal many more Easter Eggs. AMS is from a Polish publisher and has a slow-moving pipeline, in which a paper that was accepted in 2017 might be delayed until there is space for it in a 2019 issue, so its pages are time-capsules of the papermill's stylistic evolution from a few years earlier. Also 15 papers spread across various Elsevier journals (notably Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics and Biochimie); five in AMB Express, from Springer; and six in the egregious European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences.
I must not overlook the 18 productions which found their way into journals from Spandidos Publications (Oncology Reports, Oncology Letters and Molecular Medicine Reports), or the nine into journals from e-Century (International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Pathology and American Journal of Translational Research). There are undoubtedly more. In fact the dates suggest that the scriveners began their depredations there, with J.BUOn as only a secondary host. 'E-Century' is located several sub-barrels below the bottom of the barrel, but is still subsidised by the US government which archives their contents and lists them in PubMed. IJCEP and AJTR are 'International' and 'American' in the sense that the proprietor does indeed reside in Wisconsin, thereby fulfilling the requirement levied on Chinese authors that they publish in a non-China journal.
As for the Spandidos press, a fall-from-grace narrative is waiting to be told there. The eponymous founder Demetrios Spandidos was widely seen as a contender for a Nobel Prize until someone asked to see the receipts for all the laboratory rodents on which he conducted his purported experiments... everything went tits-up and he turned to predatory publishing instead. Episodes of that tale are scattered across footnotes to other people's stories and this is not the place to bring them all together.
In those early manifestations, the Photoshopping was clumsy and the contempt for the audience was poorly-concealed. The results were homages... to Monet waterlilies (h/t Elisabeth Bik), or to the classic Space Invaders arcade game, with serried ranks of cell-cluster sprites.
I hasten to add that appearance in J.BUOn is not definitive proof that a faked paper came from our current papermill. The attribution of some entries in my spreadsheet could be false. It is not as if our subjects held territorial rights over J.BUOn to stop other fantasists from using its services as well (one entry seems to be from the 'Contractor' papermill). Nor is there anything, other than stringent peer-review, to stop authors of genuine papers from making innocent mistakes like using the same Figure twice (not overlapping with other papers with different authorship). Even with that caveat, though, there are at least 250 of these mock-science fantasies (and the end is nowhere in sight), collecting citations and competing with real cancer-research findings.
The Yahoo email instantiations are dispositive, but not universally present. Their use did not become standard until 2018, so the attribution of earlier papers is more speculative. There is stylistic continuity and recycled images although the Space-Invader compositions are more skillful in later examples.
Our anonymous scriveners are most comfortable composing fairy-tales about apoptosis pathways to cancer-cell destruction -- to be more accurate, about autophagy pathways. Of course this does not narrow the scope enough to dox them. Autophageosomes -- one of the Four Horsemen of the Apoptocalpyse -- occupy a central place in their enhanced and recycled Transmission Electron Microphotographs.
The Apoptocalypse Horsemen include fluorescent stains, lighting up cells blue or green or yellow or red according to their viability or stage of self-destruction.
To be fair, the scriveners are willing to step outside their comfort zones, and on reasonable request they turn their talent for bricolage to the micro-RNA genre of fiction instead.
Now I am not saying that J.BUOn is a knowingly predatory journal, in Jeffrey Beall's sense. I am confident that when oncologists in the Balkans decided to unionise and to found a scholarly organ, they had benign ambitions and no long-term intention of creating a conduit by which papermills could disguise their MadLibs-composed cancer-cure CV-stuffers behind a veneer of academic approval. This is probably something they drifted into, as the journal was hollowed out by the Invisible Hand of the Market wielding an equally-invisible melon scoop. Along the way they collected a corps of reliably-complaisant peer reviewers, all members of the Totem of the Rubber Stamp, though they may or may not be more sock-puppets. And now J.BUOn rings the changes on the phytochemical novelties, pairing each one with different cell-lines of domesticated carcinoma (always with promising results to report, warranting further study).
The PubPeer back-end automagically sends authors invitations to join the discussions, and some have replied. Some ascribe the recycling or manipulation of images to poorly-mentored students, and promise retractions to come.
#7 Mingjun Sun
Dear professor, thanks for your comments, with obvious deficiency , we had withdraw the manuscript. Thanks for all your concern and efforts.
#4 Ronghuan Wu
#2Deer Tanganyikensis and Camphorifolia We deeply respect your comments and advice, and we have carefully investigated our raw data immediately. It turned out that there were indeed errors in these images. We would like to apologize to you, and show our thanks to you for pointing out our errors. We admire your serious and rigorous attitude towards scientific research. In fact, most of the experimental results in our research group were provided by students who conduct the corresponding experiments. Our experimental results are reliable. But this time, after our investigation, we found that the managers of the lab did not carefully check the Figures in this article, resulting in repeated images in the Figures. We We don't allow flawed articles to be published. We are now connecting to the journal to withdraw the artical，and promises it will never happen again. We will update you the information later. Many thanks again.
#10 Xiaobin Li
I am responsible for this project and the manuscript, and I will be responsible for all subsequent problems associated with this study. Thank you very much for your serious works and pointing this questions. Currently, I am in the process of contacting the editorial office for further discussions regarding withdrawal and correction of this manuscript. Sincerely yours, xiaobin Li
#8 Ke Zhang
Thanks for pointing it out. We will check the data and repeat our experiment. In order to assure the scientificity，we have contacted the editor to withdraw the article .
#2 Ruixin Lin
We agree with you.
We had already detected this problem. The error was unintentional and we have approached the editor for the correction of the figure 15 days ago. The process is underway.
#2 H He
It is quite obvious that the blots might have been copied from our manuscript published in 2017 in European review for medical and pharmacological sciences.
Anyway, thanks for taking note of it.
2 Songqing He
We appreciate the notice regarding the overlaps of Figure 5B in our published article entitled with”MicroRNA-1179 inhibits the proliferation, migration and invasion of human pancreatic cancer cells by targeting E2F5” on Chem Biol Interact on 2018 May 31st with Figure 8 in the published article (PMID: 30879017) on Med Sci Monit. by Zhang JB et al on 2019 Mar 17th. We have carefully checked these issues, and we astonishingly find that the photos of Figure 8 in Zhang’s article look like just small parts of the photos of Figure 5B in our article. We don’t know how this could happen.
#3 Shuli Yang
The manuscript entitled MicroRNA-34 suppresses proliferation of human ovarian cancer cells by triggering autophagy and apoptosis and inhibits cell invasion by targeting Notch 1 is our original research work. It took a little time to respond since we ourselves were shocked with the mysterious similarities of our manuscript with the paper entitled ‘MicroRNA-29 targets FGF2 and inhibits the proliferation, migration and invasion of nasopharyngeal carcinoma cells via PI3K/AKT signaling pathway’ published by European review for medical and pharmacological sciences
Nonetheless, after examining the manuscript, we found the authors have copied significant portion from our manuscript. This is clear from the legends of Figure 1. You can see the authors used WST assay to examine the cell proliferation in the methodology part, but in the legend of Figure 1C, they mention CCK8 assay was used to examine cell proliferation. This is because they copied it from our original manuscript and forgot to edit it (Note that we used CCK8 assay in our manuscript). This could explain why the paper was later retracted by the Journal
Zhang et al (2018) was pre-emptively pillaged repeatedly. By (at right) Shi et al (2019)...
By Pan & Zhang again, and by Wu et al (2018), and by Chen et al (2019)...
By Zhang, Zhang & Ni (2020), Xiong et al (2019) and Huang et al (2017).
#5 Qing-gang Meng
Dear Hoya,
I don't know who you are but you are doing it nicely. I have been diagnosed with advanced stage malignancy and do not check my emails regularly. Just before I was about to go far a walk, I checked my email and found one notification from Pubpeer. Consistently, I decided to reply with just one sentence. I can't do anything more at this stage of my life.
The manuscript entitled 'The Effects of Ludartin on Cell Proliferation, Cell Migration, Cell Cycle Arrest and Apoptosis Are Associated with Upregulation of p21WAF1 in Saos-2 Osteosarcoma Cells In Vitro' published in Medical science Monitor in 2017-18 is our original work and all those articles that show similarity to our article have been published after our article.
It is OK, that you are pointing out the similarities between the articles but many a times an original article is also dragged into the thread. While it may not matter to others, it is quite an embarrassment for me (and many others) at this stage of my life.
Take care Wish you health and happiness
Fa Hua is nominally the author of that seminal, citable work on Daidzein.
#2 Fu Hua
Our manuscript was published in 2018 and the study was performed long time ago. The article was submitted to different journals and ultimately ended up in International Journal of Molecular Medicine. I have moved to a different country in different institute since then
Afterwards, if somebody copies our article wholly or in part, We surely are not responsible.
Coming back to the clandestine corrections, Wei et al (2019) and then Lu et al (2019) needed a double dose, because suspicion fell upon figures left unchanged in the first round. This is what happens when patches are prepared in haste. Other patches had their own dumbprints of fabrication and will need remediation of their own.
In some recent corrigenda, the editors replaced all the original figures, which I take as a tacit admission that the scriveners couldn't remember which ones (if any) were legitimate. If only there were a way that journal editors could signal to readers that the results originally presented in a paper were all fictitious... we could call it (just spit-balling here) "Retraction".
Since the papermiller generated e-addresses for "corresponding author", presumably they also handle the correspondence, including the invitations from PubPeer. It may be that requests for revisions of J.BUOn material generally come from them. In the absence of acknowledgement of the corrections, let alone explanations, we can only speculate.
I am advised by people who contacted the J.BUOn office that the editors present themselves as the real victims here. Nefarious papermillers exploited the journal, taking advantage of loopholes in the system for peer-review, but these have been closed to prevent any recurrence. The credibility of this claim of victim status was undermined by the subsequent stealth amendments, working to improve the plausibility of the impostures rather than retracting them. It is almost as if the editors' real priority is to reward the papermill as a loyal customer.
Dear dr. XXXXXX,Literature scholars have the useful term 'ekphrasis', meaning 'a detailed, admiring description of an artwork imagined by the author'. The ultimate exercise in ekphrastics is the Hyperotomachia Poliphili, 400 pages of ecstatic raptures over one imagined sculpture or monument after another. Encountering the phenomenon of papermills opened my eyes to the possibility that ekphrasis could also come to dominate science, with a huge literature of descriptions of experiments so beautiful that they should have happened (though they didn't).
Thank you for your recent informative email. We read very carefully your observations and we agree with them. Quite recently we discovered that we were victims of a number of Chinese authors who submitted their falsified articles to our journal. Other people (pubpeer) have also informed us about this situation. We now use advanced programs to locate and reject such articles.
Best wishes and happier new year,
Nasis Athanasiou
I leave you with some final examples of the editorial repairs.
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