This fearless science sleuth risked her career to expose publication fraud
Anna Abalkina is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2024
Early this year, Anna Abalkina found out that her name was on a watch list for Roskomnadzor, a Russian agency that tracks online and social-media activity. Abalkina, a Russian citizen now working in Berlin, tries not to worry about it. There shouldn’t be a risk if she were to return to Russia, she reasons. “But the problem is, you never know.” Her colleagues advise against it.
The reason that she has come under the watchful eye of the Russian state is that she has spent 13 years rooting out fraud in the scientific literature. Her work on plagiarism and on uncovering businesses that sell fake papers — called paper mills — has focused most heavily on Russia and ex-Soviet countries, and more recently on Iran and India.
Globally, she’s also tracked hijacked journals, which are scam websites that clone authentic journal titles to con authors out of publication fees. Abalkina showed that the hijackers launder their way into respectability by becoming indexed in research databases such as Scopus. Last December, Scopus’s owner Elsevier deleted all of its links to journal home pages to counteract the problem — acknowledging Abalkina’s work. But this June, she reported that several hijacked journals continue to infiltrate Scopus.
“Cases of journal hijacking can be complex and ever-changing,” a spokesperson for Elsevier said, adding that the publisher was continually adjusting its processes so that Scopus indexed only high-quality, trusted content.
Then, this November, Abalkina flagged an unusually bold effort to clone journal sites from major publishers. They say they’re looking into the scam.
Abalkina is one of a growing cohort of sleuths working to decontaminate the literature. But she’s unusual in studying activity in Russia, in being funded to do some of this work — at the Free University of Berlin’s Institute of East European Studies — and in her focus on how fraud systems operate.
“She has considerable skills in doing the sorts of analyses that allow her to explore networks of people,” says Dorothy Bishop, a neuropsychologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who collaborated with Abalkina to document a paper mill that got six illegitimate papers published in a psychology journal (which were subsequently retracted). “She is doing very important work,” Bishop adds.
Abalkina’s introduction to research misconduct came in the early 2010s, when she was at Moscow’s Financial University, working in international economics. She was shocked to find that a PhD student had plagiarized two of her papers, copying large parts of the works. When she complained, the journal issued only a correction, saying that the author forgot to reference her work. (The student later gave up their degree after Abalkina applied pressure to their university.)
Abalkina then got involved in Dissernet, a grass-roots network of academics and journalists that examined Russian PhD theses en masse for plagiarism in 2013. It got hundreds of degrees revoked and implicated many high-profile Russian politicians.
During that time, Abalkina left Russia to pursue an economics PhD in Italy on Russian banks. She thought that she had left behind the peculiar distortions of research she’d seen in the Russian system. But instead she encountered a barrage of international research fraud, including fake studies, bribed journal editors and paper mills. Now in Berlin, Abalkina is funded to study Russian governance, plagiarism and how paper mills and other bad actors in the research publishing world operate.
Abalkina estimates that her work has led to hundreds of retractions — in particular resulting from her 2021 investigation into how a company called International Publisher, headquartered in Russia, seems to sell authorship slots on papers.
“Anna is willing to ask tough questions of powerful people. She does this in a fierce but professional way that I think makes her very effective,” says Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch. His site has published one of Abalkina’s lasting legacies, the ‘hijacked journal checker’: a tool for researchers to check the legitimacy of a given journal website.
Abalkina now wants to dig deeper into hijacked journals and paper mills, to understand how the businesses are organized and legitimized. “I would like to understand where the system fails, where there are vulnerabilities and why scholars purchase papers,” she says.
For now, she’ll continue to do that from outside the country where she was born, even as it monitors her activity. Sleuths are used to criticism and threats as a result of their work, says Oransky, but Abalkina’s Russian identity can provide “an added layer that many don’t have to face”, he says. “The fact that she keeps up the work and still pushes on paper mills in Russia is a testament to who she is.”
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03894-1
This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Holly Else
