A recent review article whose authors included two assistant professors at universities in the United States was written by a physician in India who is running a paper mill, Retraction Watch has learned.

“Current Status and Emerging Trends in Colorectal Cancer Screening and Diagnostics” appeared last year in a special issue of Biosensors, an MDPI title. The article came to our attention because it matched an ad posted by the Indian paper mill iTrilon, as we reported earlier this year;  some of the author names appeared on other iTrilon publications as well. 

The two assistant professors – Yuguang Liu of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and Ajeet Kaushik of Florida Polytechnic University in Lakeland – have not previously been tied to paper-mill publications and denied any knowledge of the ad.

According to MDPI, the link between the review and iTrilon was too weak to warrant investigation – a stance the publisher has since revised. New evidence we obtained and shared with MDPI shows the paper’s first author, Shreya Singh Beniwal, is no stranger to the seedy haunts of scholarly publishing. (Beniwal lists her affiliation as Lady Hardinge Medical College, in Delhi, on her papers, although her LinkedIn page states she left the school in 2021.)

As evidenced by a video shared with us by an anonymous tipster, Beniwal manages a sprawling network of groups and communities on the messaging platform WhatsApp. There, she and a colleague peddle author slots on research papers for between $50 and $500 each.

On Dec. 18, 2023, for instance, Beniwal posted an ad for “Paper 301” to one of her WhatsApp communities – “Research Projects: Review Articles, systematic Review And Meta-analysis Community 1” –  promising acceptance in a Scopus-indexed journal within a month. 

Authorship of the article, which was titled “Assessment of effects on cardiovascular system in systemic hepatocellular carcinoma therapy: A meta analysis,” came with a price tag of 38,000 Indian rupees (about $460) for the first position, dropping to 29,000 Indian rupees ($350) for the tenth.

The paper mill operation seems tied to a murky, fee-based membership organization called The Global Achievers Research Academy (GARA), which is also managed, at least in part, by Beniwal. 

According to a document shown in the video, members get access to support and training related to research, networking and scientific writing. Some apparently are eligible for an upgrade with extra perks. In an announcement posted to her WhatsApp community “Research Ambassadors,” Beniwal congratulated “Our Ambassadors Who Have Reached Team Milestones!” and invited them to join the community where the ad for “Paper 301” appeared.

Beniwal, who goes by the username “Dr.” on the messaging app, also welcomed the “research ambassadors” to a network called “ExquisiteGARA: The Gateway to Advanced Research and Analysis.” Participation came with such benefits as “designations like ‘Senior Ambassador’ or ‘Coordinator’” and “free participation and potential authorship for recruiting new members.” 

She proceeded to list “Our Recent Publications,” which counted the Biosensors review and an earlier paper of hers that precisely matched an iTrilon ad and has since been quietly withdrawn, as we reported in January.

In a notice posted later to the community where the ad for “Paper 301” appeared, Beniwal explained that “Participants at ExquisiteGARA” would need to pay two separate fees: a non-refundable “participation fee” as well as publication charges to be “equally shared among all members involved in the project.” 

“As we embark on various exciting research projects at ExquisiteGARA, it is crucial for all participating members to clearly understand the financial aspects associated with these projects,” the notice stated.  

Beniwal deactivated the community featuring the “Paper 301” ad in January, shortly before the publication of a six-month Retraction Watch investigation in Science that focused on how iTrilon and other paper mills had infiltrated journals across the globe. But she and a colleague with the WhatsApp handle “Education” continue the authorship trade elsewhere on the platform.

In WhatsApp and email exchanges with Retraction Watch, Beniwal denied selling authorship. “And there was not any selling regarding my [Biosensors review] paper. All authors worked ethically and we have worked on it for months. There must be some misunderstanding regarding it,” she told us.

She said of her and her coauthors: 

We connected with each other with the help of LinkedIn and WhatsApp groups with friends and colleague’s [sic] help and connections…… also I have got connections with corresponding author in the same way. Most of the paper was written by me including few figures and initial 5 sections and remaining task was handled by corresponding author by adding other members….. as they also contributed in writing some parts and final revisions were done after that depending upon revision related comments by journal. 

ExquisiteGARA, Beniwal added, is not a “platform to sell the papers. That is for workshops.” In the video we received “the good things are hidden and are being misinterpreted.” 

Asked about her affiliation with Lady Hardinge Medical College, Beniwal dodged the question and responded angrily, “Why I am even talking to you here. I am not answerable to your silly questions.”

A representative of MDPI told us on behalf of Biosensors’ editorial office:

Thank you for providing us with further details. We have also conducted a comprehensive investigation internally via our Research Integrity department. As a result, we have identified and confirmed Dr. Shreya Singh Beniwal involvement in certain unethical activities and situations related to paper mills and authorship selling activities. The published article is presently under investigation as well, and in terms of future actions, we will keep adhering to COPE guidelines and recommendations. Each submission will be meticulously evaluated on a case-by-case basis, employing standard checks and screening procedures. We will maintain high level of vigilance, particularly when dealing with suspicious activities associated with paper mills that have been previously identified through online records. We will engage in thorough discussions with the journal’s Editor-in-Chief and members of the Editorial Board to address this matter effectively.

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Two assistant professors at universities in the United States are coauthors of a review that appears to have been advertised for sale by the Indian paper mill iTrilon, a Retraction Watch investigation has found.

One of the professors, Yuguang Liu of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., is also guest editor of the MDPI special issue in the journal Biosensors in which the review was published last year. The other professor, Ajeet Kaushik of Florida Polytechnic University, in Lakeland, sits on the editorial boards of Biosensors and several other titles from MDPI, Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature and other publishers.

An MDPI representative said Liu, who declined an interview request, had not been involved in editorial decisions regarding the paper. Meanwhile, Kaushik acknowledged his work on the article had sprung from a LinkedIn message from a researcher in India who, as we reported last week, has been offering co-authorship in return for help getting his articles published.

“This is sad,” Kaushik told us by email, adding that he had not seen “any red flags” when he agreed to collaborate on the review. 

“I contributed to this review article as an ethical co-author,” he said. “I am making it clear that my role in this article does not have any involvement of money or other exchange offers.”

The paper’s link to iTrilon became apparent during a six-month Retraction Watch investigation for Science that found paper mills had taken to bribing journal editors to ensure publication of their articles. Based in Chennai, iTrilon sells authorship of “readymade” scientific papers and gets them published through a network of editors with whom it claims to be working. The company’s website was taken down following our story.

As we reported in a companion piece to the Science article, papers advertised last year by iTrilon buoyed the research output of Dionisio Lorenzo Lorenzo Villegas, a professor and dean at Universidad Fernando Pessoa-Canarias, in Las Palmas, Spain. Lorenzo acknowledged paying the company.

The review in Biosensors is one of the six papers Lorenzo coauthored in 2023 that could be linked to iTrilon. The matching ad was posted in July and referred to a “review article” about “diagnostics for colorectal cancer,” to be submitted to a journal “indexed in PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science” with an impact factor above 3. 

These details are all consistent with the review, “Current Status and Emerging Trends in Colorectal Cancer Screening and Diagnostics,” which was submitted to Biosensors on August 29.

But Giulia Stefenelli, chair of the scientific board of MDPI, said the publisher was not investigating the paper. 

“It is important to note that establishing a direct link between the articles and the content advertised by the cited platform is not an easy process. The titles of the articles and the number of authors do not immediately correlate with the published material. Should we receive further evidence that clearly distinguishes the relationship to the publications unequivocally, we will proceed to initiate an official investigation,” Stefenelli told Retraction Watch.

Liu, who is a corresponding author of the review, did not agree to an interview. But she said in an email that she was “unaware” of the iTrilon ad matching the paper and that “I don’t think it’s related to my paper or the special issue on MDPI.”

We were unable to find contact information for the review’s first author, Shreya Singh Beniwal of Lady Hardinge Medical College, in New Delhi. Beniwal was also first author of a research article coauthored by Lorenzo, which unequivocally matched a previous ad from iTrilon and has now been retracted. 

How the authors came to collaborate on the review is only partly clear. A LinkedIn message from last spring reveals ArunSundar MohanaSundaram, an assistant professor at Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology, in Chennai, and co-corresponding author of the review, had been proffering author slots on manuscripts to researchers who could help get them published. 

“I’m ready to offer ‘co authorship’ if you could review the work and support me as an EDITOR in reputed journals,” MohanaSundaram, who has coauthored several papers advertised for sale by iTrilon, wrote in the message, as we reported last week. He did not respond to repeated emails.

MohanaSundaram, Lorenzo and Beniwal came up with the idea for the review article, according to the statement on author contributions.

Kaushik said he had not heard of iTrilon until we reached out to him. But he acknowledged being contacted by MohanaSundaram:

Yes, I was approached by Dr. Arun on LinkedIn but at the beginning of this REVIEW ARTICLE. Then this paper moved forward by email exchanges. The similarity Index was acceptable, and all figures were either self-designed or with the permission. So, I did not see any red flags. I was involved in this article due to my credentials in the field of biosensors and nanomedicine.

Kaushik added:

Please note, that I am a young scholar and working hard to make a good name based on clean and ethical research. I generally want to help, but such incidents are centaily aletrs, and I will be more careful and reserv in the future [sic]. 

Presently, I am seeing some of the approaches (so-called shortcuts) to get easy or sponsored publications. BUT, I do not like and support such approaches.

Both Mayo Clinic and MDPI emphasized that Liu had not been involved in editorial decisions regarding the manuscript.

“The paper’s scientific review, revision, and submission process was handled by an Assistant Editor, Mila Opacic, not Dr. Liu,” Andrea Kalmanovitz, director of Communications – Media Relations at Mayo Clinic, said in an email. She did not reply to follow-up questions about how Liu had come into contact with far-flung authors linked to paper-mill articles.

According to Stefenelli at MDPI:

The article was accepted by the Section editor-in-chief of “Nano- and Micro-Technologies in Biosensors,” to which the Special issue belongs, Prof. Michael Thompson. In accordance with MDPI editorial procedure, Guest Editors are completely excluded from the peer-review process and decision-making stages for articles submitted by themselves and their colleagues. The MDPI procedure seeks for an independent assessment by a member of the Editorial Board for all cases of conflict of interest (https://www.mdpi.com/ethics#_bookmark17).

Kaushik, who is a member of the editorial board for the same section of the journal, said he had not been involved in any editorial decisions regarding the review article, nor in the selection of the journal.

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New editorial policies at an MDPI title accused of publishing “sadistic, cruel, and unnecessary” animal studies are missing the mark, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a U.S-based advocacy group.

The group is waging a campaign against MDPI’s Nutrients, which it says is “publishing egregious animal experiments that could have been ethically conducted in humans.” The journal’s guidelines require the “replacement of animals by alternatives wherever possible,” as a PCRM guest post for Retraction Watch pointed out last year.

A former reviewer for the journal, and one of the more than 1,100 signatories of a recent PCRM boycott letter, said she resigned from the post after realizing Nutrients published research that was “sadistic, cruel, and unnecessary,” according to a press release from November.

Email correspondence made public here for the first time shows Nutrients continues to reject the group’s concerns. In one message from 2022, it told PCRM that 21 papers flagged as problematic “contained ethics statements that are in accordance with the journal policies.” 

After PCRM complained in December 2022 to the Committee for Publication Ethics (COPE), a nonprofit providing guidance to editors and publishers, an MDPI research integrity manager explained that “we are reliant on the decisions made by appropriate institutional ethics committees and institutional review boards in this matter, and we consider at this stage the investigation concluded.”

But he added that “as a result of this complaint, Nutrients has strengthened its processing procedures by implementing extra checks, facilitating increased editorial board participation, separated decision steps, and editorial board training to proactively identify these issues.”

These changes included:

• Strengthened pre-screening check made by the editorial office, through a system integrated into our submission processing platform, to individually identify manuscripts involving animal research, and ensure relevant ethical approval and methodological information is provided as per our policy before further processing can take place.

• Introduction of a mandatory academic editor pre-check decision before acceptance to peer-review for manuscripts involving animal research.

• Introduction of a requirement for an academic editor with expertise in animal research to be invited to supervise peer-review on these manuscripts and make the final acceptance decision.

Training for the Journal editorial board members is an ongoing process. So far it has included conversations between trained in-house editorial staff and the editorial board about this issue, as well as constant reminders and sharing of information about the journals animal research policies and their responsibilities, as members of the editorial board in this regard. The journal has also placed increased emphasis on this within the information packet that all editorial board members receive. And finally, editorial staff have initiated discussion with senior editorial board members about the necessity for recruiting more members with specific expertise in this area to strengthen the current coverage for this subject.

COPE found no fault with how the journal handled PCRM’s concerns, adding:

We appreciate that this may not satisfy the presenter’s concerns regarding the specific articles, their design and research justification, but it is beyond the remit of the Facilitation and Integrity subcommittee to comment on the scholarly content of publications. 

Janine McCarthy, science policy program manager at PCRM, said the new editorial policies have fallen short.

“None of the checks that they implemented really take a look and say, does this actually meet Nutrients’ guidelines to use replacements [to animals] when available?” McCarthy told Retraction Watch. 

“They should be responsible for the types of papers that they publish, and they should be doing an additional check to make sure that the papers that they’re publishing in their journal actually adhere to their guidelines,” she said. “It’s not hard. It didn’t take us very long to find alternatives that were available for all these studies that they’re publishing.”

Nutrients, an open-access journal, charges authors 2,900 Swiss francs (about US$3,400) to get published. According to PCRM, the payments  come out to more than US$16 million annually. The group has found animal studies make up about a fifth of Nutrients’ publications, netting MDPI more than US$3 million in author fees.  

One such study that PCRM has flagged looked at saffron’s potential effect on depression. Here is how McCarthy described the research in a Retraction Watch guest post from March:

The manufacturer of a saffron-based nutrition supplement explored the spice’s purported mood-boosting properties. But rather than administering the supplement to volunteers and tracking their depressive symptoms with validated instruments, as other researchers have done, the manufacturer force-fed it to mice via gavage and dropped the animals in water tanks to conduct forced swim tests as a measure of their mood. 

“It seems to us that there is an incentive to just publish research no matter the quality,” said McCarthy, adding that the new policies appear to have had little effect on what appears in the journal. 

“We haven’t noticed any difference,” she said.

In a December editorial, Nutrients’ two editors-in-chief defended themselves against the criticism, writing:

.. we all agree that animal experimentation should never be the preferred method of testing.

Nor should it be regarded as a failsafe way of demonstrating drug safety and efficacy in and of itself. However, there may be instances where animal experimentation offers the only viable means of securing therapeutic benefits that will help alleviate forms of human suffering that are currently unaddressed.

We would like to call on all institutions that carry out such tests to do everything in their power to adopt the necessary measures and controls so as to obviate the need for animal experimentation in the first place. 

“The editors and the journal in general are trying to wash their hands clean, saying that they don’t participate in animal research as a journal,” McCarthy said. “And be that as it may, they still should be responsible for the types of papers and research that they publish.”

Giulia Stefenelli, chair of MDPI’s scientific board, reiterated that Nutrients had investigated the articles flagged by PCRM. 

“On our side, we consider this matter closed and we will not comment on this further,” she told Retraction Watch, speaking on behalf of MDPI’s management team. 

Stefenelli also listed the editorial changes Nutrients had put in place, adding: 

On top of this, the journal Nutrients is in the process of further strengthening the procedure requiring for [sic] authors to submit a ARRIVE checklist (ARRIVE Compliance Guidelines (https://arriveguidelines.org/sites/arrive/files/documents/ARRIVE%20Compliance%20Questionnaire.pdf) at submission stage, and for authors to justify the use of animals in the study within the submission cover letter, which will be reviewed by the Academic Editor during the pre-check phase.

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Scopus has completed its reevaluation of MDPI’s journal Sustainability and will continue to index the title, according to the publisher. 

As Retraction Watch previously reported, Scopus, a product of Elsevier, had paused indexing articles from Sustainability at the end of October while reevaluating whether to include the journal. Removal from the index can lead to a decline in submissions because universities and funders use Scopus to create journal “whitelists.”

The reevaluation process concluded January 4, according to Stefan Tochev, CEO of MDPI. 

“Following this evaluation, it has been determined that Sustainability meets Scopus’s content selection standards,” Tochev said.  The content that was not indexed during the reevaluation will be added to Scopus within the next 4 weeks.

We asked Elsevier for comment on Scopus’ decision, and a spokesperson responded: 

The review was done according to the regular Scopus quality criteria and the decision was made to continue coverage by Scopus. Details about the journal review are confidential.

As we have noted:

In 2022, Norway removed Sustainability from its list of journals that researchers get credit for publishing in, and Finland followed suit at the beginning of 2023. 

…
The number of articles from Sustainability indexed in Scopus has increased nearly every year since 2009, its first year of coverage, when 78 articles were indexed. In 2022, the journal published over 17,000 articles. Scopus indexed about 13,500 in 2023, before the pause.

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Elsevier’s Scopus database has paused indexing content from Sustainability, an MDPI journal, while it reevaluates whether to include the title, Retraction Watch has learned. 

Other MDPI titles were reevaluated in 2023, and its mathematics journal Axioms is no longer included in Scopus’ nearly 30,000 titles. Clarivate also delisted two MDPI journals, including the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, from its Web of Science index earlier this year, meaning those journals will no longer receive impact factors. 

Universities and funders use Scopus to create “whitelists” of journals in which authors are encouraged to publish, so removal from the index can influence submissions.

In 2022, Norway removed Sustainability from its list of journals that researchers get credit for publishing in, and Finland followed suit at the beginning of 2023. In the announcement of its decision, the Finnish Publication Forum wrote: 

Sustainability also publishes high-quality articles, but the wide scope, large publication volume and fast publication processes have undermined confidence that the journal’s procedures to ensure scientific quality work reliably down the line. The large variability in quality is partly the result of thousands of special issues that are common also in other MDPI journals.

The number of articles from Sustainability indexed in Scopus has increased nearly every year since 2009, its first year of coverage, when 78 articles were indexed. In 2022, the journal published over 17,000 articles. Scopus indexed about 13,500 in 2023, before the pause. 

Staff for Sustainability learned on October 30 that Scopus’ Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB) were reevaluating the journal, according to Elaine Li, the managing editor. 

Li confirmed the journal’s indexing is paused due to the reevaluation. If the process concludes positively, the content put on hold will be indexed within four weeks, she said. 

According to Scopus’ title reevaluation policy, the index identifies “outlier and underperforming journals” for scrutiny based on citation metrics and benchmarks compared to other titles in the same field, when “legitimate” concerns are raised about the journal or publisher, or if Scopus’ algorithm flags outlier behavior. The CSAB can also decide the journal should be evaluated again. 

Li told us: 

No specific concerns were raised when the editorial office was asked to provide information required for the re-evaluation, therefore we are assuming that the reason for this re-evaluation is the continuous curation based on CSAB feedback. 

“Several other journals of MDPI’s portfolio have already undergone re-evaluation” in 2023, Li said, “and the majority was evaluated positively and is continuing to be indexed in Scopus.”

We asked Elsevier for more information, and a spokesperson responded:  

We consider information about journal reviews as confidential. Once decisions are made relevant outcomes will be communicated through the regular channels.

Update, 1/2/24, 2030 UTC: MDPI CEO Stefan Tochev told us after this story was published:

As at January 2024, MDPI has 269 of journals indexed in Scopus. Notably, 54 of these journals were added in 2023, underscoring our dedication to maintaining rigorous academic standards across various disciplines. While we acknowledge Scopus’ reevaluation process for specific journals, it’s crucial to understand the scope and depth of our presence in this indexing database.

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