Thread by @Dr_Meming

13 months since I reported an obvious case of plagiarism. The paper is still online. Journal gone silent and no longer replying to emails.

Ready to name and shame both authors and the journal.

@OpenAcademics @AcademicChatter #academictwitter #sciencetwitter

@OpenAcademics @AcademicChatter First author on the paper that plagarised ours: orcid.org/0000-0002-0805… as you can see he has a v large number of papers across multiple research topics.

@OpenAcademics @AcademicChatter I picked a paper of his at random, copy and pasted the first few lines of the abstract and oh look, its copied from another article as well.

@OpenAcademics @AcademicChatter I've never seen an academic with knowledge and papers spread across so many disciplines, nor a senior author on so many papers who does not yet have a PhD.

@OpenAcademics @AcademicChatter A reply I received last year from Springer after I bombarded them with emails:

'Considering that the authors originally denied the claims, and that the plagiarism is not word by word, it was essential to have an expert's opinion'

'RIG has proposed a retraction wording that I have shared with the EIC who has approved it and I will be sharing the wording with all of the authors to give them a chance to react'

'Once they have agreed or disagreed to the retraction (or if they have not reacted by a specified date), the retraction wording will reflect this and be sent to production for finalization shortly thereafter'.

'Given the authors denied the claims, they may not agree with the retraction decision but I will be giving them a week to respond to and moving to next steps soon thereafter. I hope this is a helpful update and please let me know if you have any further questions'

I received this email in August 2021. No retraction wording on the article, it is still online and being cited. And my emails to the publisher/editor are now being ignored.

@OpenAcademics @AcademicChatter Oh and to add to the pain, I was initially selected by @springerpub to be a reviewer on the paper prior to publication. when I responded to say yes, they somehow 'no longer needed me as a reviewer'

@OpenAcademics @AcademicChatter At risk of exposing my identity and losing my anonymity on twitter, here are just a few examples of blatant sentence copying

Them: CLU was also found to incorporate in the amyloid aggregates, which were more harmful as compared with the Aβ42 aggregates alone

Me: In the latter, clusterin was also incorporated into these amyloid aggregates, which were more toxic than aggregates containing Aβ42 alone

Them: A common approach to study the CLU’s effect on the aggregation of Aβ and subsequent toxic effect is incubating amyloid preparations without or with CLU.

vs me: A common way of studying the effect of clusterin on Aβ aggregation and resulting toxicity has been to incubate amyloid preparations with or without clusterin in different biological systems.

Them: In a study, cytoprotective activities of CLU were identified in Aβ-supplemented AD CSF-treated SH-SY5Y cells, where the introduction of a mixture of extracellular chaperones including CLU into the CSF maintained cell viability (Yerbury and Wilson 2010).

vs me: On the one hand, clusterin’s cytoprotective effects were detected in a study with SH-SY5Y cells treated with Aβ-supplemented AD CSF, where the addition of a mix of extracellular chaperones including clusterin into the CSF preserved cell viability (Yerbury and Wilson, 2010)

vs Me: On the one hand, clusterin’s cytoprotective effects were detected in a study with SH-SY5Y cells treated with Aβ-supplemented AD CSF, where the addition of a mix of extracellular chaperones including clusterin into the CSF preserved cell viability (Yerbury and Wilson, 2010)

But it isnt just sentence copying, the whole structure and concept of the paper is THE SAME

@OpenAcademics @AcademicChatter Hilariously, they also cited me within their article.

And they seem to reference their own papers taking credit for other people's work.

@OpenAcademics @AcademicChatter A quick reference check reveals half are incorrectly used. 'The strongest AD risk factor is aging (Uddin et al. 2019)' and the paper cited is: ;Emerging signal regulating potential of small molecule biflavonoids to combat neuropathological insults of AD'

What’s even sadder is this is clearly not the first time, a quick search of the author would make anybody suspicious. Hundreds of papers, across multiple disciplines and all before starting a PhD.

Me waking up this morning to see academic Twitter sharing my rage about this.

What’s disappointing is that I remember seeing the paper published and was excited to see a paper that might help me during my thesis write up.

Then as I was reading, I had deja vu moments: ‘have I already read this paper before?’

Then I realised.

@OpenAcademics @AcademicChatter Tagging @FrontNeurosci here as they were the journal I published my article.

@OpenAcademics @AcademicChatter Thanks to @MicrobiomDigest for suggestions on how to tackle this going forward, I have now posted on @PubPeer and now we wait.

Hey @springernature would love to hear your opinion on this?

@OpenAcademics @AcademicChatter Reading more and more of his papers and finding evidence of plagiarism, lifting sections from multiple other reviews, and slightly rewording. Even worse, instead of citing the appropriate paper, he is inserting a random paper of his own, thus taking credit for others' work.

Email to @retractionwatch sent. I honestly can’t wait for the reply

I guess I’ve been doing academia wrong

Further suspicious activity. Screenshot taken of intro from recent review. Notice how many times he cites himself ‘Uddin et al’. A total of 8. All of which are papers totally relevant to the information preceding it.

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Uddin et al’s paper ‘exploring the multimodal role of phytochemicals in the modulation of cellular signalling pathways to compact age related neurodegeneration’ that demonstrated degeneration of synapses and neurons in Ad leads to a clinical phenotype

@OpenAcademics @AcademicChatter omfg checking references in a single review and none BUT A SINGLE ONE is correct. All are totally random. How is this not picked up?