Mystery over Obesity "Fraud"
A researcher is baffled after his results on metabolism appeared in a bogus publication, authored by people who seem to be phantoms
"Spiegelman says that he smelt a rat as soon as he saw the paper. Meteorin and metrnl have been little studied, and no previous paper has shown a role for them in obesity. It was therefore suspicious, he says, to see a paper published out of the blue reporting that they were novel adipokines and that their overexpression in adipose cells led to improvements in diabetes and obesity in mice — exactly the same findings as the work he had presented.
On 20 July, he e-mailed Ernesto Carafoli, BBRC’s editor-in-chief, to air his concerns. “The authors on this paper have apparently never published a single academic paper before and they list a non-academic e-mail address,” he wrote. “Odder still, upon looking for them on Google, PubMed or on the website of the university they list, there is no mention of any of the authors as being at that university.”
Carafoli, along with Elsevier, launched an investigation. Elsevier temporarily withdrew the paper from the journal website on 8 August, and, after the University of Thessaly confirmed that none of the researchers listed on the paper had ever worked there, now intends to withdraw it permanently."
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