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David Cox, the co-director of a prestigious artificial intelligence laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was scanning an online computer science bibliography in December when he noticed something strange: his name was listed as an author alongside three researchers in China he didn’t know on two he did not recognize newspapers.
At first he didn’t think much about it. The name Cox is not uncommon, so he thought there must be another David Cox doing AI research. “Then I opened the PDF and saw my own photo looking back at me,” says Cox. “It was incredible.”
It’s not clear how common this kind of academic fraud is or why anyone would name someone not involved in the study as a co-author. By checking other articles by the same Chinese authors, WIRED found a third example, where the photo and biography of an MIT researcher was listed under a fictitious name.
It could be an attempt to increase publishing opportunities or gain academic standing, Cox says. He says he has heard rumors that academics in China are being offered financial rewards for publishing with researchers from prestigious Western institutions.
Whatever the reason, it highlights weaknesses in academic publishing, according to Cox and others. It also reflects a wider lack of rules around article publishing in AI and computing in particular, where many articles are posted online without prior review.
“This stuff wouldn’t be so harmful if it didn’t undermine public confidence in peer review,” says Cox. “It really shouldn’t happen.”
Cox, who leads the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a collaboration that explores fundamental challenges in AI, was credited as the co-author of two articles in the niche journal Cluster Computing. One paper concerned a machine learning method to protect mobile networks against cyber attacks; another outlined a network scheme for a smart transportation system in Macau.
The paper identified by WIRED, about another smart transportation project, an author named “Bill Franks”, reportedly a professor in MIT’s electrical engineering department. There is no Bill Franks in the electrical engineering department at MIT. The paper, which appeared in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, showed a biography and photo for an actual MIT professor, Saman Amarasinghe, alongside the fake name. Amarasinghe did not respond to requests for comment via email and an MIT spokesperson.
“The article in question has been withdrawn”
All three papers have since been withdrawn and publishers say they are investigating. But Cox was upset that the magazines would be publishing something so obviously fake in the first place. He says IEEE has quickly withdrawn Bill Franks’ paper listing.
“Our investigation has identified evidence of a violation of IEEE policy, and in accordance with our editorial procedures, the article in question has been withdrawn,” said Monika Stickel, director of corporate communications and brand marketing at IEEE.
But Cox says it wasn’t until he threatened legal action that Springer Nature, the publisher of Cluster Computing, removed his name from the two papers and issued a revocation. He was told the magazine had received an email confirming he was an author, although it was via a Hotmail address.
“The fundamental challenge we face is that publishing has relied on trust for decades,” said Suzanne Farley, director of research integrity at Springer Nature. “Unfortunately, it has become apparent that there are some individuals and groups who intend to mislead and abuse this trust, as well as instances where there are honest mistakes and misunderstandings.”
Farley says that sometimes academics do not use an institutional email address, in which case an attempt is made to confirm that the address and author are legitimate.
According to Retraction Watch, a website that tracks academic fraud cases, one of the Chinese authors, Daming Li, a researcher at the City University of Macau, blamed a junior author, Xiang Yao, who is affiliated with a Zhuhai company. Da Hengqin Science and technology development. Li told the publication that Yao added Cox’s name after “listening to his good ideas” and said the investigator had been fired. Li and Yao did not respond to email requests for comment.
Ruixue Jia, a professor at UC San Diego who has studied Chinese academia, says the authors may have wanted to “falsify some kind of international collaboration, which is often encouraged by universities.”
“Making up the appearance of a scientific dialogue”
In an earlier example of academic fraud, more than 1,000 papers were withdrawn between 2012 and 2015 because one or more of the peer reviewers turned out to be fake, Retraction Watch said.
Cox says the incident shows the poor quality of some of the published academic works. “In a way, I think what happened to me was that the system was working ‘as it should’,” he says. “It’s all about making up the appearance of a scientific dialogue.”
Brent Hecht, a researcher at Microsoft and Northwestern University who focuses on ethical issues surrounding computer science, says the lax approach is broader. Many articles are published for the first time without peer review on arXiv, a server on which researchers can read the latest work. He notes that without peer review, authors’ links to these papers can serve as a proxy for legitimacy and quality. “Science is working towards an economy of credit, so if credit is allocated or obtained in the wrong way, everyone loses,” says Hecht.
This story originally appeared on wired.com.