Recentl, Nick Wise on 𝕏 reported a retraction as one author submitted the paper, but when it was published it had nine authors on it (you can see the post and my comment here (if you have an 𝕏 account) here.
The PubPeer comments are also worth a look.
Retraction
The reason for the retraction was:
“In investigating concerns brought up regarding inappropriate advertisement of the authorship of the article, the editor reached out to the authors for an explanation. Post-publication, the editor also discovered suspicious changes in authorship between the original submission and the revised version of this paper. In summary, the paper was submitted by a sole author, Parvaneh Delir Kheirollahi Nezhad. During revision, the author names Saade Abdalkareem Jasim (New First Author), Moaed E. Al-Gazally, Hasan Sh. Majdi, Yasir Salam Karim, Maria Jade Catalan Opulencia, Mustafa M. Kadhim (New Corresponding Author), Ali Thaeer Hammid, and Yasser Fakri Mustafa were all added to the revised paper without explanation and without exceptional approval by the journal editor, which is contrary to the journal policy on changes to authorship.“
Comments
We thought it might be interesting to look at the authors. The header image shows the nine authors. The last one is the author that submitted the paper, the other eight were added later. Here are some comments/observations.
- The most striking thing is that the eight “invited” authors all saw a dramatic rise in the number of publications in 2022 (this is shown by the red highlight for each author). Could this be when they started buying authorships?
- It’s also interesting to see the publication record of these eight authors since 2022. This is varied. Not sure what to make of that. You would have thought if they were buying authorships, they would keep doing it?
- The last author (the person that submitted the paper originally as a single author), their publication profile is different to the other eight authors, in that they did not see a sudden rise in 2022.
Do you have a view?
Do you have any views/comments as to what (if anything) can be read into these author profiles (from Scopus, 25 Aug 2024)?