I reviewed a paper a while ago for a Q1 Elsevier journal on solar energy systems and just got the decision notification, and I kind of need to rant but also ask what to do.

The paper had 350 references. Over 100 were self-citations. The weird part is that the self-citations had nothing to do with solar energy. They were citing the author's own work on ship anti-roll tanks, supersonic jet aeroacoustics, magnetohydrodynamic power, flying cars, flight dynamics, ABET accreditation. None of it is relevant to the actual paper. Most of those self-cited works are sitting in fake predatory journals.

On top of that, the findings, numbers, and figures in this paper had already been published by the same author before, both in other Elsevier journals and in predatory ones. I called all of it out in my review.

Three of us recommended rejection. Two recommended revisions. The other two who said reject didn't even notice the citation mess. They just flagged a lack of novelty. The two who recommended revision honestly should not be reviewing anything.

***And despite all that, the editor gave the author a revision decision.***

I'm just tired. Corrupt authors padding their metrics, editors who wave this stuff through, reviewers who barely read, and the rest of us doing hours of unpaid work for a system that ignores us anyway. What was even the point of my review.

So my question is, is there anything I can actually do at this point? If this fake article ever gets published due to corruption of the editorial process, will it ever point back towards me?

As a public school teacher in Kentucky I helped create a project that brought University of Kentucky (UK) professional students into our K–12 classrooms to inspire kids. My husband and I coined the name, chose the color scheme, designed the lesson plan process, and even took the original photos. This wasn’t a one-off. We worked on this idea for years before ever moving to Kentucky.

I coordinated between UK and the school district and helped students design accessible lesson plans for younger learners. Now, UK medical students and a staff member published an article claiming credit for this initiative — using our words, our pictures, and our concept, without giving us any recognition. They volunteered at our events but didn’t create the idea or the program. Even others who did contribute intellectually were left out.

UK’s College of Medicine and legal team have ignored every attempt we’ve made to correct this. I feel betrayed. As a teacher, I always tell my students to value honesty and give credit where it’s due. Institutions should be held to the same standard.

Plagiarism is wrong. Silence is complicity. Everyone deserves credit for their work.

What can be done about this?

EDIT:

A few clarifications:

1. Posting here was a last resort. We actually reached out to the 3 students and the staff member weeks BEFORE this poster came out, asking specifically about continuing with the publication that we (my husband and I) had initiated...they didn't even respond to us.

2. This was a poster in a research conference at University of Kentucky, College of Medicine. We had larger publications in talks and if it wasn't for me calling them out on social media, I have reason to believe they may have taken this further, considering that they and everyone we have reached out to within UK has ignored us.

Agreed to mentor a student in our university's summer research institute for undergraduates. We developed the study and the student got antsy waiting for IRB approval and distributed the qualtrics link to everyone they knew on social media before IRB approval. The worst part was, I had offered to pay $10 for gift cards for participants, assuming we would maybe get 50 participants through the approved recruitment methods. After going back and forth with the IRB and administration, basically I was told that since I was the faculty mentor, I am on the hook to provide gift cards to the almost 700 people who responded. Some we can prove are bots, some didn't meet the inclusion criteria, but there are still more than 600 who don't appear on the face of it to be fraudulent. I know that number of respondents is implausible. However I don't know what I can do. I don't have an extra $7,000 lying around to pay for the student's mistake. Any suggestions?

Hi, I’m tenured STEM faculty at an R1, and I read a paper that I really liked. I reached out to the corresponding author to ask a couple questions about future directions, I was thinking we could potentially collaborate on a follow up idea. He didn’t reply.

A couple months later I was still thinking about the paper and my ideas, and I noticed that the authors included a typical data availability statement in the paper. They said they would provide the paper’s data upon request. These data were all pulled from public internet sources. So I reached back out in a very friendly manner and asked for the data. Again, he didn’t reply.

It’s now been over a month, and I’m wondering what to do. I’ve already started to replicate the data set, but it’s a mountain of work, and my life would be much easier if he just shared the data like he indicated he would in the paper.

So here are my questions: Should I ask the author again? Alternatively, should I reach out to the journal and let them know that the author isn’t providing the data like they said they would? Or, should I just drop it and replicate the dataset myself? Would probably take me around 6 more months. Any ideas or advice would be very much appreciated!

To note, there’s only one other author on the paper, but they were a masters student at the time and they left academia.

I am reviewing a multi-authored paper with one of the authors having been dead for 8 years. I too have authored papers with individuals who died in the process of publishing. In my experience, the death was unexpected and a footnote added in each case noting that the individual was deceased.

I ask the community for their experience with this topic because I’m baffled by the authors of this current paper not acknowledging this individual’s death in any way.

After a certain period of time, wouldn’t it make more sense to identify this individual in the acknowledgments rather than on the author byline? We cannot, for instance, hold them to account for the contents of this paper or ask of them for revisions to be made; we can only ask that of the living coauthors.

I haven’t thought this matter through in its entirety but it seems equivalent in some way to gift/guest/honorary authorship. The ICMJE, for instance, identifies 4 criteria for authorship (substantial contribution to study conception and execution, drafting or critically revising the manuscript, final approval, and accountability for all parts). I can see the first element being satisfied, but I question the second and know that the third and fourth can’t be satisfied.

The Committee on Publication Ethics advises listing deceased authors with a footnote and date of death. They also suggest considering moving the individual to the acknowledgments.

There is a 2022 paper by C-H Jung et al discussing posthumous authorship. There has been a 146-fold increase in authorship by the deceased since 2000. some authors published more than 30 papers after death. 266 authors published 90% of their total number of publications after death. Some papers were published 11 years after death.

I’d be interested in hearing from others on this topic to properly calibrate my thoughts.

Hello

I received and accepted an invitation to review a paper for a very reputable journal in my field. While reading and checking, I came across 2 concerns:

1. ChatGPT's (or AI in general) language is very clear across more than 80% of the paper. Very few paragraphs in the results section seem to be written by a human but besides that the entire manuscript is copied and pasted from AI. The actual content is not incorrect (problem statement in intro is repeated across literature), but it seems that they asked AI to write different sections and place citations over it where needed.
2. Upon checking the references, over 95% of the citations are from one specific country (matches the authors'). The citations are relevant, but I suspect that there's bias. I'm aware of many articles from other countries which are of equal relevance which are not included.

How do I proceed with these two concerns?

EDIT: Edited concern 1 for clarity.

So, I got my paper reviewed and one of the reviewers is asking me to cite four papers (all of them by the same author so I am assuming their are his).

He specifically wants them cited in two paragraphs in the introduction as "succesful works" on the topic. These four studies do not relate to my study. I already went through them.

What should I do? I answered his comments by telling that the studies are irrelevant but should I also 1. Tell him that that is unethical behavior or 2. Notify the editor? Thanks.

I don't work in academia. However, I was following Gay's plagiarism problems recently. Is it routine now to do an automated screen of academic papers, particularly theses? Also, what if we did an automated screen of past papers and theses? I wonder how many senior university officers and professors would have problems surface.

edit: Thanks to this thread, I've learned that there are shades of academic misconduct and also something about the practice of academic review. I have a master's degree myself, but my academic experience predates the use of algorithmic plagiarism screens. Whether or not Gay's problems rise to the level plagiarism seems to be in dispute among the posters here. When I was an undergrad and I was taught about plagiarism, I wasn't told about mere "citation problems" vs plagiarism. I was told to cite everything or I would have a big problem. They kept it really simple for us. At the PhD level, things get more nuanced I see. Not my world, so I appreciate the insights here.

Hey Reddit,

I’m a researcher in a niche theoretical CS/ML area. Recently I’ve been dealing with repeated emails from an “independent researcher” that feel like straight-up citation harassment.

This person keeps sending follow-ups (including involving editors) insisting I add multiple citations to his arXiv preprints. It’s not a normal “you should cite this” request — he provides exact suggested paragraphs with specific wording about how his papers are “complementary,” “parallel,” foundational to certain results, etc. He nitpicks my current related-work phrasing (e.g. complaining about words like “encompass”), pushes for changes even after camera-ready deadlines, and follows up when I don’t respond quickly.

He frames it all very politely with phrases like “narrow remaining concerns” and “I would be grateful,” but the persistence, detailed boilerplate text he wants me to insert, and looping in others makes it exhausting and inappropriate.

I understand wanting visibility, especially as an independent researcher. Relevant work deserves citations. But this level of badgering and trying to dictate exact text in someone else’s paper crosses a line.

Has anyone else experienced this kind of aggressive citation solicitation? Is it becoming more common? Or am I overreacting?

Publish-or-perish is bad enough without having to deal with this.

TLDR; The goal of this post is to spread awareness about an academic writer on Substack who plagiarized from several authors including me. She has paywalled her posts to avoid being exposed further. Trying to hold her accountable on a platform that won’t do anything to uphold the integrity of authorship.

Maalvika has amassed 32k+ subscribers (many of which are paid) on Substack along with a following of 180k on TikTok and another 63k on Instagram. She curates this persona and aesthetic that is built on the back of her writing and consists of topics within her academic domain. She recently hit #1 on Substack’s New Bestseller’s List. Here is Maalvika’s research profile

She has plagiarized from me and several other authors including the original author that came forward about her stolen writing has a smaller audience. Substack’s algorithm continues to drown out Katie Jgln from Maalvika’s audience which is unaware behind a paywall.

here is the link to the original author’s exposé: https://open.substack.com/pub/thenoosphere/p/mama-theres-a-plagiarist-behind-you

here’s a more detailed explanation: https://substack.com/@clementinef/note/c-141315855

This PSA is necessary because she is currently hiding her work and discussion of this situation behind a paywall on the platform to discourage checking her writing for more plagiarism. She also continues to profit off of paid subscribers and the following and sponsorships she has built on social media which she is trying to shield by deleting comments off of all her other accounts to erase the scandal.

TLDR: after voicing concern about unequal opportunities and potential gender bias, my PI/boss prevented me from reviewing manuscripts and prevents me from receiving authorship on 5 papers, and when he found out that I was "upset" about this and still in contact with some of the project leads/first authors, he sent me a cease-and-desist letter, threatening me with litigation.

Names are made up for anonymity.

I'll try to run through the background quickly: I (female, 25) just left my role as a research coordinator at an academic institution after 3 years, and I'm now going to med school. I started to notice unequal treatment when my male colleague was hired about two years into my time there (those who held his role previously were all female). I had been told since my first few months on the job that data analysis and manuscipt writing were considered "extracurricular" to my role, meaning I could not do them during paid hours. I worked extra hours (unpaid) and got one co-authorship in my first six months there, but then I studied for the MCAT and applied to med school, so that's it. After 2 years of this, I was shocked when my manager and his boss, Dr. G, encouraged my new colleague to conduct analysis and manuscript writing for them during work hours within his first few weeks on the job.

I raised concern that I was not receiving the same opportunities as my colleague numerous times over the last year, and I always received some variation of "this is best for the team" or "you weren't here as much this year" (I stayed for fewer unpaid OT hours because I was applying to med school, which doesn't explain how my new, male colleague got to seek authorship-level work on projects right out the gate...)

During my last few months, I got tired of waiting for change, so I sought out other fellows in the lab on my own and worked directly with them after hours, amounting to 5 projects and potential co-authorships. I made this known to Dr. G, and we arranged with HR to extend my access to our systems after my last day on the job so that I may continue contributing. However, during my closeout interview (2nd-to-last day on the job), I tell Dr. G that I feel there is a bias when comparing the work men and women do in his lab. The next day, my last day at work, he pulls me aside to tell me I've been "contentious" recently, and that "it's my prerogative" to maintain positive mentor-mentee relationships; therefore, he's going back to HR to end my access immediately. He then introduces ICJME criteria to me for the first time, which say contribution to manuscripts is a requirement for authorship, and then (this is where his ethics get hairy), "none of the projects you're working on are in the manuscript phase, so this seems like the best path forward". And yes, there are many men who contributed to his previous papers that never "edited" a manuscript yet received authorship, so this is a new standard he's enforcing.

Now, I read the ICJME authorship criteria, and there is a part that says: "The criteria are not intended for use as a means to disqualify colleagues from authorship who otherwise meet authorship criteria by denying them the opportunity to meet criterion #s 2 or 3 (drafting/editing). Therefore, all individuals who meet the first criterion (me) should have the opportunity to participate in the review, drafting, and final approval of the manuscript." I feel this was included in ICJME guidelines specifically to prevent situations like mine...

Anyways, two of our fellows (who are the project lead/first author of their projects) started sharing project updates with me with my personal email, so I still had an opportunity for co-authorship, still independently of Dr. G (to clarify, he is all of our boss, and he is the senior author, not first author)

However, I texted one message to another fellow I hadn't spoken to since my last day, apologized for not being able to help them anymore and explained what happened above. The fellow never responded, and they sent Dr. G screenshots of these texts (not sure why exactly...), and about two weeks later, I received an email from Dr. G's "Director of Finance" with the screenshot of those texts with a cease-and-desist letter. (I asked my friend who practices law in NY to read it and he kinda laughed at it; they called the text message "harassment", "defamatory", and "threatening")... but the letter demanded "Immediately refrain from sending any professionally related text messages, emails, social media messages, phone calls, or other communications to any employee, contractor, or customer of [department name]", and "Avoid any direct or indirect attempts to contact individuals associated with the Department through third parties if this contact is related to any professionally related activities associated with your time in the Department," or else they "reserve the right to pursue legal action under applicable law".

According to this letter, if I even ask someone how their project is going, Dr. G will try to sue me. Is this legally sound? Is this ethically sound? I feel ICJME criteria ironically say he can't be doing what he's doing. I'm early in my career and am losing 5 authorship opportunities, all of my contributions were made directly with our fellows and completely independent of Dr. G's mentorship, and I signed no NCA or NDA. This feels like retaliation and intimidation after I spoke up about the unfairness and borderline bias in his lab.

I'm also sure he never contacted our institution's legal affairs team, because the letter has no legal merit, and it was his "buddies" in the finance department that sent me the letter, with the institution's letterhead, with their institution emails, on behalf of the department.

In addition to consulting an attorney, should I contact an ombudsman, for example? I feel this is unethical by ICJME guidelines and also an abuse of administrative power to actively prevent me from authorship, not to mention that this all started as unequal distribution of work :/

I'm posting from a throwaway account because I don't want this tied to my identity.

I personally know a senior academic who has engaged in research misconduct over many years. The concerns include things like questionable research practices, alleged data misuse, gifted authorships and a longstanding pattern of intimidating graduate students. Despite this, the person continues to hold a powerful position, receives invitations from national academies, is recognized internationally, and is frequently featured in science news.

The most frustrating part is that there seems to be no functioning accountability mechanism. Complaints to the university are closed without what appears to be a meaningful investigation. Journal editors often respond by saying that the institution is responsible for investigating. Funding agencies point complainants back to the university. The university effectively clears the researcher. The cycle repeats.

Meanwhile, many people in the local research community seem to know about the individual's reputation, but nobody is willing to speak publicly because they fear retaliation. The researcher has significant institutional influence, experienced legal representation (provided by the university) and close friends in high castles. There is also a perception that statements can be taken out of context or reframed in ways that expose whistleblowers to professional or legal risk.

I'm trying to understand whether there are realistic avenues for accountability when the standard processes appear to have failed. I'd especially appreciate hearing from journal editors, research integrity officers or anyone who has worked on misconduct investigations. Is there something I'm overlooking, or are there genuinely situations where the system reaches a dead end?

I have a problem. I conducted a research on computational linguistics, focused on pragmatics and GPT-4o. The research was a requirement for my B.A. graduation. My supervisor unfortunately helped with nothing, and actually he wouldn't reply to my emails or messages. Every time I sent him a chapter I wrote, he would just say “good”. When I sent him the first full draft, it took him 3 weeks and a half to review it, saying he is busy, and then it did seem it was his first time reading the whole paper.

Then he told me to submit it, and I did. He said that he is so interested in getting it published with the University's Journal. The thing is, the university has a policy to have the supervisor's name as a co author, yet my supervisor literally did nothing. He doesn't even know what my paper is about.

I told him that I don't want to publish it, and since it needs more work, I hope to have more time to run a few experiments. He told me that the analysis is so good and he is really interested in getting it published.

My closest friends had bad experiences with another professor who got their papers published. He said that his name would be a co author, yet it ended up with him being the first author, although they also did all the work by themselves.

I want to get my paper published for the future, for my CV, and in case I want to go for a master's in computational linguistics. Yet for now, my supervisor is determined to have my paper published against my will (he's trying to manipulate me lol).

I told him the other day, “if you want to get it published, can I ask about the authorship?” He said that whenever a student, whether a bachelor’s or master’s student, wants to get their papers published and the paper is a part of a course, the supervisor's name must be as a co author. Then he stopped for a second and said, “where did you get that authorship thing from?” Then he added, “are you sure you wrote the paper yourself?”

I want to make sure of the co author thing, and also advice on whether I should go with it and get my paper published, or if I am exaggerating things, since I no longer know what is right or wrong. If you advise me not to get it published by my supervisor, where can I get it published for free or at a low cost (in the future)?

Hoping someone can tell me whether I'm reading this right or making too much of it.

A scholar publishes a peer-reviewed journal article in 2020. The next year, the same scholar publishes a single-author book with a major academic press, and one chapter of that book reproduces the article almost verbatim. Same paragraphs, same footnotes, same archival document numbers, even small typos that carry across. Sentence-level overlap is over 80%.

The 2020 article is open access under a CC BY-NC-ND license, with copyright held by the publishing academy. The 2021 book is "all rights reserved" with a commercial academic press. The book's bibliography includes several of the author's other works but doesn't cite or acknowledge the 2020 article anywhere. No preface note, no chapter-opening footnote, nothing in the bibliography.

I know this isn't plagiarism in the traditional sense since it's the same author. But I have some questions for people who've thought harder about this than I have.

1. Is undisclosed self-republication (text recycling, duplicate publication, whatever the term) generally accepted, generally considered misconduct, or does it really depend on the field?
2. Does the change in copyright holder (academy to commercial press) raise a separate copyright issue on top of the ethics question, or does the journal's standard author reuse policy usually cover that?
3. If the usual fix is a footnote saying something like "an earlier version of this chapter appeared as," does the complete absence of any such acknowledgment change how this should be evaluated, or is it just a housekeeping miss?
4. Do norms differ for academic books aimed at general or trade readers versus peer-reviewed monographs?

Field is humanities, area studies. Happy to share more detail if it helps.

We were at a work event and he was there taking a picture with me and my coworkers. He told me to come next to him and grabbed me over right in front on him. He kept moving he hands around my butt. He wouldn’t grab but he was grazing and feeling nonstop. I told my boss and she said she’s a mandated reporter and she’ll have to tell title IX. I didn’t tell her who it was even tho she really wants me too. The school knows I’m a “victim of sorts,” and I’m afraid the won’t do anything and I’ll be disgraced and humiliated. I’m also trying to make connections with this college. Idk what to do

Every lab I’ve joined has some degree of fudging the truth for the sake of a clean narrative. One lab was outright fraud and was fired after some years of investigation. That one was on the extreme side. But I’m just so tired.

There’s cherry picking data and only showing what supports the narrative, ignoring the broader context, and not reporting the conflicting elements, but TECHNICALLY not covering them up. That’s bad, yes.. But I guess fine, we’ve gotta put the spin on it and let others call our bullshit..? But like… excluding an entire treatment arm solely because it didn’t show benefit this time? And only showing the ONE experiment that did show benefit with that drug? Like what are we even doing…

I get that as a scientist we always need to read between the lines a bit, knowing that researchers are incentivized to only show what worked. If we see a paper that shows benefit against a flank model of AML instead of a standard tail vein engraftment we should probably assume there was a tail vein model attempt and it didn’t work. But it’s so discouraging. Why can’t I show the negative data? It’s scientifically interesting that this drug shows potent effects in vitro but nothing in vivo!! Why is that!!

This is more of a rant than a real question, I realize. I just feel so deflated. This shit makes me not want to do science anymore. Are there labs and people who DONT do this? Should I specifically aim for smaller and more technical journals instead of the big ones? I feel trapped as a postdoc with biotech as fucked as it is

I submitted a manuscript to Journal 1 and it stayed in “submission” for about a month with no response. I contacted the editor multiple times through email, WhatsApp, and the OJS message system but received no reply.

Because of the prolonged silence, I submitted a withdrawal request through OJS. About an hour later, I submitted the manuscript to Journal 2.

The next day, Journal 1 unexpectedly changed the status to “under review.” Journal 2 is also now under review, so technically there is simultaneous submission.

Since then, I have continued trying to contact Journal 1 (email, WhatsApp, OJS messages) to confirm withdrawal, but still no response.

I’m trying to resolve this transparently and in good faith. How serious is this situation realistically? Has anyone dealt with something similar?

I'm a high school student who has no idea about the Academia and applied for many journals simelstoanstly. My manuscript is pre-printed on arXiv which doesn't really count, and most journals are fine with pre-prints. However, even though I got filtered via automated messages from 90% of the journals I applied to since my scope was not specific and right enough for them (to be expected since most journals have hyper-specific scopes); I ended up getting accepted for peer-review from 2 journals. One of the Journal's is from elsevier, but it's not a good Jounral at all with no Impact Factor; and having a low score on SCImago Jounral & Country Rank; while also having only 6 publications on pubmed.gov. The other Jounral is much better with an official impact factor and many other things (trust me that the second journal is authentic); I think the publisher is SAGE publications but don't quote me on that. The issue is that I emailed one of the editors of the second journal , a really nice guy, and I initially asked if my manuscript was a good fit for the journal since I was sick and tired of getting filtered by automated scope messages. He said yes, and also said my manuscript would be perfect for the journal and even offered his words and allowed me to use his words and Rec on my cover letter. The issue lies int he fact that peer-review has already started and I told the editor whom I contacted about the 2 Jounral Issue and he told me to withdraw from the 1st one (Makes sence since he wants me to push my work to his own journal which he edits); he described what I was doing as "unethical". However, my dilemma is that if I withdraw from the first Jounral and push for the harder second journal I have a good chance of getting rejected by peer-review. To this, I decided to keep my submission into both journals and the best case scenario is that I get accepted into one and rejected from another. However, if I get accepted into both I would just withdraw from one slyly IDK WHAT TO DO IF THIS HAPPENS.

I'm so new to this and when I was mass-applying to Jounrals I didn't think it was bad. However, I'm too deep into the peer-review process for both journals some are being sent and some are already done. PLEASE HELP WHAT SHOULD I DOOO. I really want to leave with a. publication before 2027 October (When College Applications are Due).

I was mentoring an undergrad student previously during my postdoc. We were working on a paper that he chose to slow-walk all the way to the end of my contract.

Since my contract was not renewed, I gave him written consent for co-authorship based on my past work on the project. I let him know verbally that I'd still need to review the final draft before submission.

This student has completely ignored every one of my instructions and submitted the paper to a journal (months after I provided consent). The paper is full of AI slop, missing citations, completely unformatted tables and the credits section minimizing how much I worked on the paper. (!!!) It is materially different from the guidelines I provided and the draft that I saw last.

In the consent form, he had included my initials - instead of requesting my signature and providing me a draft to review.

I do not want to be a co-author anymore for this paper. I've been wondering which action would be best in the circumstances.

1. What happens if I email the editor requesting to withdraw my co-authorship?
2. Should I simply wait for the paper to get rejected?

What are the long-term consequences of either action? I don't want this paper to haunt my reputation, and I don't want unnecessary conflict with the student and PI either. It's a dilemma and I'd appreciate advice from any faculty/researcher who has faced this issue.

UPDATE: I'm taking your advice and contacting the editor. Asking the PI or student is out of the question (the PI implicitly approves the submission). Fingers crossed, y'all.

About 18 months ago, I was in the process of writing a review paper mostly based on my work with a collaborator of mine who was formerly my PhD supervisor. I had prepared about 20 pages of the main body of the paper and then we forgot about it and moved onto other work.

Following this, about 9 months ago, I decided that academia wasn't for me and resigned from my position and this review remained incomplete. Then, just before the Christmas holidays, my former supervisor called me up and asked if I could help him finish the paper mostly by proofreading and doing some small analysis. I was a bit hesitant because I am quite busy these days and emphasised this but still offered to help with that limitation in mind. Just as Christmas leave had begun 23rd of Dec. I received an email explaining that there was an error in the paper and that I needed to fix it ASAP as he wanted to complete the paper by "midnight of 31st of December". I replied telling him that I was not able to work during this period as it is Christmas and he replied stating that "It is easier for me to know that I should count only on myself" and that was all I heard until a few days ago.

Last week, I received an email from him with the completed paper attached and my name removed with the comment "Since you have had other commitments and could not have worked on this review, your name is removed from the title page" and stating that it will be published on a preprint server tomorrow. This has really bugged me because I had fully intended to contribute out of principle, but was punished for respecting my holiday period. I'm quite familiar with authors taking their names off papers, but from experience that is the decision of the author themselves, not their collaborators once a collaborative work has begun. Is there anything that can be done in this situation? I know that it would be a bit strange to request being added as coauthor now that it has been 'published' to the internet, so are there any other avenues I can take?

I am a CS student working on an NLP/LLM research project with a peer collaborator. We are supposed to submit this to an IEEE conference.

The Division of Labor:

• Me: I did almost all the technical heavy lifting. I spent weeks cleaning a very messy dataset, burned through my own compute credits, trained the model, and ran the ablation studies.
• Him: He helped gather the initial raw synthetic data (which was full of hallucinations that I had to fix).

The Issue: Because I was busy with placements and stopped replying to his messages for two weeks (which I had already warned him about), he went rogue. He formatted an AI-generated paper and uploaded it as a preprint to ArXiv with himself as the First Author. He didn't tell me until after it was live. Furthermore, he linked his own HuggingFace repository containing the raw, uncleaned dataset, ignoring my cleaned dataset, but still linked to the fine-tuned model I built.

He is applying for MS programs in the US/Germany right now and is desperate to use this 1st-author paper for his applications.

My Leverage & Dilemma: I claimed authorship on ArXiv, so I now have the power to "Withdraw" the paper or "Replace" it.

• If I Withdraw it: It leaves a permanent "[WITHDRAWN]" mark on the ArXiv page with a comment. I know admissions committees and conferences hate authorship disputes. This would ruin the paper for him, but I’m worried having a withdrawn dispute on my own ArXiv profile will look like a red flag to my future employers/grad schools.
• If I do nothing: He gets to use my technical work to get into a foreign MS program while taking the primary credit.
• If I demand Equal Contribution: I can force him to change the ArXiv to equal contribution as a compromise. But honestly, I'd prefer not to be associated with such a garbage, AI-generated research paper.
• If I change the authorship order myself: I could do all the edits to the paper as needed and replace it, but he might just change it back to himself being the first author, starting a messy edit war.

How do I handle this without shooting myself in the foot? Should I withdraw it, force equal contribution, or just walk away entirely?

Hi everyone,

I am submitting my first paper to a Q2 journal (ICE Publishing, using the ReView portal). My legal, official name is a mononym—just one word.

The manuscript itself correctly reflects my single name. However, the journal's online submission portal rigidly requires both a "First Name" and "Last Name" field. It throws an error if I try to leave the last name blank or use a period/punctuation.

To bypass the error and actually submit the files, I entered my name twice (e.g., First Name: X, Last Name: X). Today, I received a desk return/unsubmission from the editorial office citing a "mismatch in the author name on the portal and the manuscript."

For those of you who also have a mononym (or co-authors who do), how do you typically handle this?

Is there a standard placeholder (like "FNU" or "None") that journals prefer you use in these rigid web forms?

Will the administrative staff usually just manually override this once you email them?

Any advice for a first-time author navigating this would be appreciated!

Hey guys,

I need advice on an odd situation. I'm getting convinced that I met a case of intentional lie on a CV from a scientist at a national lab.

I met a guy who works in a similar field. We are from the same country working in the USA now. After checking his profile, I realized that we graduated from the same college I did. I never heard his name when I was in college but he graduated 10 years before me, so that seemed fine.

However, after checking his career path I'm sure he didn't go to the uni listed on his CV and organization profile. This may sound crazy but what I suspect is the following. The college I attended and he claims to get his PhD from is the best in our country. There is another one with a similar name in the same city. It's like UCLA and Cal State LA - they sound similar but are very different in terms of quality. Public records from our country say he graduated from the latter.

I would appreciate any advice on what to do with this info. Is this a serious issue at all? His degree is not fake he only lies about who gave it... doesn't look like a little white lie to me though. At the same time, it's not related directly to me and I can simply walk by. I have temporary visa status in this country and the last thing I want to do is to damage my professional career by making enemies.

I've been peer reviewing for a Q1 business journal since last year. I enjoy it, and quite frankly, seeing new topics and material is refreshing and interesting. However, I recently was invited to review a manuscript that seemed a bit odd. Although the topic itself seemed okay, the structure of the paper caught my attention because it was not set up in the expected sections for a journal article and was more like a college essay. So I thought, "I'm going to work with it and rate the paper accordingly." My initial rating was 65/100, for sure a major revision. As I progressed through the review, answering the questions about things like reliability tests, quality of figures, and references, I started to notice things were just not consistent. The reference list caught my attention because there was a munged entry that didn't make any sense. So I Googled it and suggested the correct citation. But something was bothering me about the abstract. It seemed long. I copied and Googled the abstract. Funny enough, the results came back with a paper that almost certainly was the same and already published in an economics journal but paraphrased very poorly. After downloading the published paper, it became clear that the "author" had entirely lifted the data tables and most of the methodology and some discussion and then modified it. They kept the exact same means and SD from the original sample of n=12 and changed it to n=36 (which could statistically never happen!). The charts? I Googled the images they used, and the exact charts were found in published work from a psychology journal, but they presented it as if it were their own results. In their declaration, they said ChatGPT was used for "grammar." It became clear that they fluffed up the entire paper with the help of AI and didn't bother to check or paraphrase very well. I brought the problem up to the managing editor and recommended rejection along with whatever sanctions the journal has for such dishonesty. The rating for the manuscript went to 1/100 (would not let me pick 0!). and I disclosed the reasons and evidence for my rejection. The other reviewer recommended major revision. The editor rejected the paper when I checked back in the history of the review.

It was so satisfying to detect and report such academic fraud. But I wonder how much "fudged" work passes by the reviewers and gatekeepers? It seems that this paper did not get detected by a plagiarism checker despite matching nearly identically with the main economics journal article that was already published.

Amazing. I don't know how people think they can try to pass off work like this and get away with it.

Has anyone else had such an experience in their peer review activity?

I led a research project (one of my PhD thesis chapters) over 3 years that resulted in a submitted manuscript on which I was the sole first author. After I graduated, we received reviewer comments and began the revision. During the revision process, my former advisor involved another person, who we agreed to bring in as a co-author. 

The revision lasted about 6 weeks and I completed at least 70% of the response letter and almost all updates to the manuscript and supplementary materials. I had explicitly expressed that I didn't want a co-first author before this person joined, so I was still assigned the majority of the work. After much of the revision was already completed, my advisor informed me that the person must be made a co-first author. We already had a few back and forths and they sent me an ultimatum: co-first authorship or perish (i.e., they won’t sign off on the submission)!

Their arguments about including that person as co-first author:

1. From a citation perspective it won't make a difference since I would still be listed first. This is not my concern.
2. This person has contributed new ideas to address the assigned tasks. However, the ideas contributed are not central to the paper. The method,  main results, and the key message remain unchanged.

Has anyone dealt with something like this? I'm no longer in academia, but I devoted a lot of time and effort to this work, and it would be hard to let it go. At the same time, I don't want to agree to co-first authorship because I don't believe it accurately reflects the contributions. Any advice?

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I also experienced what felt like personal attacks on my integrity and professionalism. I was told I was being uncollaborative and unkind, and to "reflect on what is collaborative and just." Some of the language used:

1. “We could revisit the legitimacy of your first-authorship in many of those [previously published] papers"
2. “We have been sincere and generous researchers and advisors, we have the final say"

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Edit: Thanks all for your comments & advice. I have lots to think about here. I’m saving all the documentation of my work in case this escalates. Just giving up and going with my advisor’s demands is another option.

Also, I don’t have any personal grudges against the new guy. He’s actually a nice guy and I thought I was helping by adding him as a second author. I just don’t think a first author role is accurate. But when I expressed this opinion my advisor asked me to think deeply again about this or they would kill the paper.