According to The Insider, pharmaceutical chemistry expert, Associate Professor Dmitry Bokov at Moscow State Medical University No. 1 (Sechenov University) is accused of building an international co-authorship network, where the right to appear in scientific articles is bought and sold like a commodity.
In addition, he was involved in systematic plagiarism to submit hundreds of articles to prestigious academic journals in Europe and the United States.
Moscow State Medical University No. 1 (Sechenov University) where Associate Professor Dmitry Bokov works. (Photo: Sechenov University)
According to an investigation by the Russian science magazine T-invariant and anti-plagiarism activists, Bokov published 260 articles in five years, including 100 in 2022 alone, or an average of two articles per week. These impressive numbers put his h-index (academic index) on par with many Nobel Prize-winning scientists in Physics.
Buying and selling reputation through the "academic exchange"
Investigators initially suspected Bokov was doing this to secure research grants from the university. But this was only a small part of the “publishing machine” he was running. From paying to be listed as a co-author on plagiarized papers, sometimes lightly edited by rewriting software, Bokov gradually became an “author broker,” selling spots in scientific papers to scholars from the Middle East and South Asia.
The platforms for this activity were exchanges such as Mezhdunarodny Izdatel' (Russia), Latvian Science Publisher Company (Latvia) and an unnamed platform based in Iran and Iraq. Bokov used his relationships with these publishers to “stuff” his and his clients’ names into scientific papers, creating the impression of international cooperation.
One notable point is that the citations in Bokov’s papers are often unrelated to the main content or cite poor quality work. According to For Better Science, an ecosystem of “citation brokers” has emerged, specializing in inserting fake citations into Bokov’s papers, allowing both the hirer and Bokov to inflate the h-index to their mutual benefit.
Nonsense articles
The cheating was so well concealed that popular plagiarism software was stumped. Only by manually checking each word did investigators discover the copied content.
A typical example is the article referring to the meaningless concept of “quality tuberculosis” - allegedly the product of automatic word replacement software, in which “suspension” is mistakenly translated as “tuberculosis”.
Associate Professor Dmitry Bokov runs a global “plagiarism market.” (Photo: Sechenov University)
As of 2022, at least 19 of Bokov’s papers have been retracted for plagiarism, questionable co-authorship, or citation manipulation. Yet the vast majority of his other papers, especially in low-ranking or “fake” journals, remain undetected and continue to be counted in the scholarly record.
In addition, the investigation revealed that Bokov also operated in two roles. On the one hand, he was a prestigious nutritionist and pharmaceutical chemist at Sechenov University and was closely associated with Russian and Eastern European research groups. On the other hand, he appeared as a “global co-author”, constantly contributing to a series of interdisciplinary works with authors from Asia and North Africa, published in Q1-Q2 journals in the Web of Science and Scopus systems.
However, reputable journals typically only “opened” one or two of Bokov’s papers before detecting irregularities and starting to reject further papers. The researcher then focused on Indian journals in the Q3 group and below, which have looser editorial standards and are more susceptible to manipulation.
Sechenov University also benefits: each article published in a prestigious journal brings funding from the state budget, along with internal rewards for “high-performing” faculty members. If an article is retracted, the authors are largely ignored.
Professor Bokov did not act alone. One of his closest associates was Rafael Luque, author of more than 700 papers, who was fired from the University of Córdoba (Spain) for receiving illegal money from Saudi Arabia and Russia.
Now working at RUDN University (Russia), Luque is doing the same thing Bokov did: building a transnational network of fake scientific publications. Both Bokov and Luque are being ridiculed as symbols of the Russian “publishing industry”.
Source: https://vtcnews.vn/pho-giao-su-tre-dieu-hanh-thi-truong-dao-van-toan-cau-dung-chi-so-hoc-thuat-ar946688.html
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