"Ghost authors" at Stockholm University in OpenAlex

[Gabor Schubert]

Hi,

I was checking the coverage of OpenAlex for Stockholm University (SU) and I found a few very strange articles from 2023 and 2024 allegedly authored by SU researchers:

https://openalex.org/W4380342601
SU author: "Kewan Waled"

https://openalex.org/W4379391905
SU author: "Maciejewski Valeria"
https://openalex.org/W4380836732
SU author: "Kho Crosbie"
https://openalex.org/W4381093778
SU author: "Kho Crosbie"
https://openalex.org/W4379526145
SU author: "Lewin Carsten"
https://openalex.org/W4388040891
SU authors:  "Björn Söder Selkrig, Jimmie Åkesson Bungay, Pär Holmgren Grosz" (these are the names of famous Swedish politicians with extra added last names)
https://openalex.org/W4389307577
SU author: "Kate Jolene"
https://openalex.org/W4380224593
SU author: "Thomas Edison"  (the famous inventor was never affiliated to SU and died almost 100 years ago, although he was elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.)
https://openalex.org/W4401677597
SU author: "Lina Karlsson" (common Swedish first and last names, but there is no such person at SU)

These author names often do not give any hits in Google searches except for these articles and are almost 100% are not affiliated to SU. The articles were mostly published in diffetent Indonesian journals in various topics and the language usage of the articles have a somewhat AI-generated feeling.

Has anyone experienced similar "ghost articles" while searching in OpenAlex?

Thanks,
Gabor Schubert
Stockholm University Library

[Kaveh Bazargan]

I am heavily involved in Research Integrity, with a lot of questionable practices prevalent. I asked a colleague. He said:

I'm familiar with "ghost authors" - fake articles (usually lifted from other journals) attributed to existing or non-existing scientists from prestigious universities.
This is/was common practice in "Experimental and Theoretical Nanotechnology".
One randomly chosen example here:
https://etnano.com/index.php/journal/article/view/31

I suppose one can argue whether this is a "ghost author", a "ghost article" or whether both are ghosts... 

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[Kaveh Bazargan]

More responses from my colleagues. 

====

Just picking out https://openalex.org/works/W4380836732 at random and seeing the name “Charvet Joanna” for the University of Cologne I tried to find them: no listing on the university web site, only on Facebook. Could it be that the Indonesian University of Jendouba insists on only counting publications with foreign researchers, so some are made up and the “Journal Neosantara Hybrid Learning” is happy with that?

===============

And I have a colleague who is affiliated to SU and happy to dig deeper if you want. :-)

Regards
Kaveh

[Gabor Schubert]

Hi Kaveh,

Thanks for your replies. It would be interesting to understand what is the reason that these articles exist in the first place. I have two theories:  1) some kind of scheme to game citations/references. 2) to fill up journals with bogus articles from seemingly respected authors to gather "real" articles from "real" authors who pay "real" money for APCs. Apparently many of these fake articles have no real authors at all.

 

What is a bit scary, that there is no easy way to discover these articles. The journals/publishers have registered DOI prefixes at Crossref and the articles are registered and indexed by Crossref with valid DOIs. Automatic harvesting of scholarly publications by large publication databases like OpenAlex, Lens, Dimensions, etc. will naturally pick these up as well. As far as I see these articles are included in all the larger publication databases. For instance the article with distorted Swedish politician names as authors (https://openalex.org/W4388040891) is included in 

Lens: https://www.lens.org/lens/scholar/article/146-864-492-724-964/main (affiliated to SU)

Dimensions: https://app.dimensions.ai/details/publication/pub.1165442641 (without affiliation)

 

I had another interesting observation with the article "Structural and optical properties of Cu-doped Ti02" by the made-up German author from Experimental and Theoretical Nanotechnology (https://etnano.com/index.php/journal/article/view/31): this article is included in OpenAlex three times with three different DOIs. All three DOIs are registered in Crossref, but only one of them resolves to the journal page with the article the other two give "404 error":

https://openalex.org/works/W4401315051, with DOI 10.56053/7.3.143, no affiliation in OpenAlex, correct DOI link
https://openalex.org/works/W4384339758, with DOI 10.56053/7.3.427,  German affiliation in OpenAlex, dead DOI link
https://openalex.org/works/W4384340057, with DOI 10.56053/7.3.425,  no affiliation in OpenAlex, dead DOI link

Obviously this is a misuse of the resources of Crossref and OpenAlex, and it would be important to find a way to exclude these actors from the databases. I only found these fake articles by chance during manual control of SU articles, but possibly there are many many more similar fake articles in the databases as you also mentioned.

Best regards,

Gabor

[Amanda French]

Just a note that while I don't work in this area at all at Crossref, I reported this to my colleagues who do, and Crossref has opened an investigation. If "fraudulent use of metadata or identifiers" by a Crossref member can be proved then that's cause for suspension (at least) of Crossref membership. The journal _Experimental and Theoretical Nanotechnology_ was actually already under investigation.

Questionable metadata like this can be reported to Crossref by filing a regular support ticket using the form at https://crossref.org/contact or (if you're comfortable) posting something publicly on the Crossref Community forum at https://community.crossref.org/.

Cheers,

Amanda

Amanda French

ROR Technical Community Manager

Crossref

On Tuesday, February 11, 2025 at 10:00:07 AM UTC-5

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