A biologist was shocked to find his name was mentioned several times in a scientific paper, which references papers that simply don’t exist.
A biologist was shocked to find his name was mentioned several times in a scientific paper, which references papers that simply don’t exist.
Your assumption is wrong. This was not carelessness. Academic dishonesty and lack of integrity is an ongoing issue in research. China is one of the biggest culprits for blatant plagiarism and IP theft, although recently even academics from Ivy league universities have been implicated in fraudulent publications. The simple fact is that number of publications is the main metric used in academia for hiring and promotion. This leads to a perverse incentive model where academics prioritise publishing over conducting good science, thus all we get is a shit load of noise (poor articles) that obscure the signal (good articles).
Sure, let’s make this about China when 4 out of 5 of the authors credited for the original article are from Africa.
While only one of which was from China. This doesn’t even address the fact that the republished paper came from Mawcha which describes a study on millipedes in… Africa. Guess what, Wenxiang Yang wasn’t even credited in this version. Was your reply carelessness or dishonesty and lack of integrity? I don’t care where the misinformation and carelessness comes from as long as we’re making efforts to stop it, but this is highly ironic.
In academic publishing you look at the order of authors and the author contribution statement to determine the hierarchy of the research group. In this case the Chinese author is the most senior, and was the member who approved the submission. In such niche areas as this most senior academics will know most of the relevant authors and literature. Thus carelessness is too kind a word where negligence and lack of integrity would be more fitting.
Further, with regards to the primary author my assertion still stands, it was not carelessness but rather brazen academic misconduct, as demonstrated by the resubmission (not republication as you suggest).
FWIW, last author is not automatically most senior. That is the way some fields do it, but others do it strictly by amount contributed to the paper. I have been both first and last author on different papers during my first post-doc.