A professor found her name on an article she didn’t write. Then it got worse | Hacker News Reader

A professor found her name on an article she didn’t write. Then it got worse

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Please edit the clickbaity title.

HN rules strongly prefer original article titles, even if they're a bit clickbaity.

On the contrary, the guidelines ask for original titles unless they’re clickbait:

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That title is neither misleading nor linkbait. It does veer close to the "You'll never guess what happened next" form but it's accurate as far as it goes.

It is clickbaity because it gives a little information while teasing a bigger revelation if you click through.

Which there was. Not only was her name used but the paper was largely plagiarized which could have all sorts of consequences. I'm not going to argue it's a great headline but it's the one on the article and the clickbait police could just chill sometimes.

So... "A professor found her name on an article she didn’t write, which was plagiarized"

>Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

> the clickbait police could just chill sometimes

I would personally prefer the clickbait police to be alert and vigilant in identifying and penalizing submissions that rely on sensationalized headlines to attract clicks and traffic.

> That title is neither misleading nor linkbait.

Debatable, but my comment didn’t argue either way. It clarified what the guidelines say, not how they should be applied to this particular case.

(This comment sounds like you're defending yourself, but I didn't read ghaff's comment as an "attack.")

One wonder what the point is of filing fake publications for somebody else. It could be that the magazine is scamming libraries? Or perhaps a vindictive colleague?

Reminds me of SEO link spam attacks on competing websites to get them banned by Google.

And it can look bad for the site or the person at first glance unless someone bothers to investigate--and instead they'll often just take their first impression, shrug, and move on. (Oh wasn't that the researcher who was somehow somehow involved in some plagiarism thing a few years back?)

It is likely a predatory journal, and it needs to have a backlog of seemly legit papers authored by seemly prestigious authors.

At least two possible reasons, all bad.

1. Steal, increase credibility for the article and the (assumed) real authors by attaching the name of a successful researcher with high credibility. People need to publish a number of papers to get their degree. Doing this may help them getting published easiser. A bit like also stealing the actual contents of the paper from an already published paper.

2. Destroy the credibility of a researcher by attaching their name to a paper that is falsified, plagiarized.

My very unfounded guess is that it is more (1) than (2) at play here. But research in political science is probably more at risk to cause anger and enemies than say cosmology. Unless the research is related to dwarf planets or some such.

But (1) would assume that there are multiple authors, no? The OP claims that she was the sole author of the article.

In that case, I would offer 3. The journal is trying to boost their stats. One wonders how long they thought they could have gotten away with faking articles to fill a journal...

Good point, and not unheard of.

Also, looking at the article in question. It seems to suggest a policy of punishment as a solution to solving the issue of people, companies not following recycling rules: "the government should continue to closely monitor and punish violators of laws and regulations."

So I'd like to add incentive (4): A way to seemingly have established researchers suggest punishment as accepted way of enforcement. Drive agenda, basically.

Ah, I missed that detail. Checking the actual article, and you are correct:

https://www.internationalscholarsjournals.com/articles/impac...

> But research in political science is probably more at risk to cause anger and enemies than say cosmology.

Ha! The iron rule of academia is that the lower the stakes, the more vicious the interpersonal conflicts :)

Another possibility would be to prop-up a fake journal/conference cycle, which is used by some interest groups to publish and thus "validate" dishonest research which then goes toward their own business/political interests. Think "money laundering", but for scholarly credentials.

There is a very interesting DEFCON talk[1] called "Inside the fake science factory" about this.

[1] https://youtu.be/ras_VYgA77Q

I understand the original article that was plagiarized was quoted in the paper. Maybe the authors of that article wanted to bring attention to it and needed someone else to validate their work.

There are no references in the plagiarized article. It reads more like an editorial. (https://www.internationalscholarsjournals.com/articles/impac...)

I've actually seen this before, interestingly also involving specifically-African entities and a Russian native.

As best I could tell, it was being exploited as a form of identity theft. I think it's what the kids informally call "skinwalking" (when they do it to each other on Instagram for likes or other social currency).

Professionally, the scheme starts with finding a credible individual whose reputation you need to hijack, so a career researcher or someone that's been publishing papers for 20 years but nowadays is not as active. In this case, the impersonator emigrated to a new country and renamed himself on the naturalization paperwork so his name was identical to the target's (a former oil exec in this case-- let's call him Oily Man).

At that point, you start pretending to be active in the target's domain. Start publishing papers as Oily Man. Start going to conferences as Oily Man and wearing your name badge conspicuously. People that only recognize the name will mistake you for the real one and strike up insider conversations-- and remember seeing "Oily Man" at the conference. People suspicious of you that know the real guy, you explain away as mistaken identity of two individuals who happen to work in the same space (there's no expectation of disambiguation; you had no choice in what your parents named you, right?).

The result is that anybody that googles Oily Man finds a 20+ year work history, a bunch of papers "he's" currently written, and a bunch of conferences "he's" recently attended. You're basically finishing someone else's life story. Since the real Oily Man is retired/inactive, there's no chance of crossing paths with him, and since you're not claiming to be him, there's little consequence even if you do. It's everyone else's fault for conflating the two of you!

There was a very specific purpose to this scheme that culminated in the impersonator using the target's identity (and others!) to secure a seat on a particular board to (I surmise) fraudulently cast votes on a particular subject, but I can't disclose the details of that.

I also got a good chuckle out of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)

When did it get worse? The article just ends without anything happening

It got worse because it was also plagiarized.

The article attributed to her was also plagiarized.

I can't parse that statement. Fake article under her name was someone else's article for which that someone did not give a permission?

You did parse the statement.

When someone wrote a clickbaity article about it.

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