A Paper Mill Is Targeting Scientific Reports, Authors from China and West Asia May Be the Costumers
Jalil Manafian, an author from Iran, published 7 articles on Scientific Reports in 2024. All of them have fishy authorship patterns: (1) Chinese authors were listed as first authors for the articles, the 8 Chinese authors (one as the second author) were from 8 different institutions; (2) the others authors for each article were from multiple nations in West and South Asia, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, India and others. The widespread cooperations between these authors suggesting the articles potentially originated from paper mill, although the 5GH team has no details whether Manfian is running this paper mill.
Most of the articles (5 of 7) were submitted to the journal, Scientific Reports, a Nature Portfolio title, within a short period between April and May in 2024. However, the journal and/or the publisher, Springer Nature, did not notice these patterns, or did not consider these patterns questionable, the articles were published months after the submission, most between August and October, 2024.
Part of Manafian's other publications has similar authorship patterns. According to his ResearchGate profile, Manafian has published over 200 articles until recently. The 5GH team checked part of Manafian's publications, and found 48 articles with similar authorship patterns. The investigation is still under process, and the team is checking Manafian's other publications, more questionable articles may be detected in the coming days.
Those articles targeted journals like Results in Physics, Optical and Quantum Electronics, International Journal of Modern Physics B, and others. And some of the Chinese costumer were from top universities like Peking University. Please find the Supporting Information for more details about the articles.
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