The current scientific system is governed by the “publish or perish” imperative. Researchers are evaluated by the number of studies they publish in peer-reviewed journals and by the number of times these papers are cited by other colleagues. The well-intentioned mechanism, however, has produced adverse effects, as explained by the British engineer Nick Wise, a researcher at Cambridge University who, in his spare time, seeks out fraud in science. Wise has uncovered shady “factories of scientific studies,” produced by copying and pasting other studies or by automatic text generators, and whose authorship is secretly sold for hundreds or thousands of dollars to inflate resumes. “I found a study by Rafael Luque whose authorship had previously been offered in a group on [the messaging platform] Telegram,” Wise said.

The Spanish researcher published that paper on the degradation of ibuprofen in wastewater five months ago, with six co-authors from the University of Bushehr and another from the University of Tabriz, both in Iran.

Luque is constantly publishing papers. Last year he authored some 110 articles. So far this year he has published 58. The chemist admitted that since December, he has been using the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT to “polish” his texts. “These months have been quite productive, because there are articles that used to require two or three days and now I do them in one day,” he said. ChatGPT, launched in December, is capable of generating in-depth texts in response to complex questions. Luque said he basically uses it to improve his written expression in English and strongly denies having any relationship with any wholesale research factory.

Russian mathematician Alexander Magazinov, like Wise, also spends his spare time combing scientific literature for “tortured phrases”: unusual expressions that are added to plagiarized texts, precisely to avoid the computer programs that detect plagiarism. One example is to replace the usual “artificial intelligence” with “falsified consciousness”. Magazinov mentioned that a non-existent “vegetative electron microscopy” appears in two studies by Luque published with Iranian colleagues.

Scientists around the world use an American website called PubPeer to anonymously and ruthlessly comment on articles by other colleagues, and not always with reason on their side. There are critiques of around 90 of Luque’s studies on PubPeer, many of them from Magazinov himself. A common reproach is that the Spanish chemist’s papers include dozens of unnecessary citations to other articles to artificially inflate the number of citations from other colleagues. In 2018, the University of Córdoba boasted that 84 out of 100 of Luque’s studies were cited by other scientists.

This man is scamming the same, " has it been peer reviewed?" system that people who don't understand the knowledge filter use as an excuse to ignore new data.

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-04-02/one-of-the-worlds-most-cited-scientists-rafael-luque-suspended-without-pay-for-13-years.html?outputType=amp