Recently, Russian scientists, whose scientific portfolios include hundreds of significant achievements, have unexpectedly begun utilizing co-authors from the Middle East and Southeast Asia with questionable reputations. Is this phenomenon related to the reorientation of Russian science “to the east”? This is discussed in the new issue of “Plagiarism Navigator.”
In mid-September, the Elsevier Data Repository website published the annual ranking of the top 2% of the world’s leading scientists by citation count, compiled based on Scopus data as of August 1, 2025. To determine each scientist’s position in the ranking, a composite scientometric indicator was used, normalized for the given field of science in such a way that the ranking gives equal weight to research areas with both higher and lower citation densities. In scientometric literature, this indicator is commonly referred to as the c-score. It was first introduced in 2016 by the Greek-American researcher from Stanford University, John Ioannidis. Essentially, the combined c-score indicator represents the sum of the logarithms of six indicators, normalized separately for each given field of science. These include: the total number of citations received (nc); the Hirsch index for citations received (h); the Hirsch index for citations received adjusted for co-authorship (hm); the total number of citations received in articles where the scientist is the sole author (ncs); the total number of citations received in articles where the scientist is the sole or first author (ncsf); the total number of citations received in articles where the scientist is the sole, first, or last author (ncsfl). Quantitative values for each of these indicators are also provided in the overall summary table of the ranking. Since 2019, the ranking of the world’s leading scientists has been published annually. In this year’s new version, for the first time, the number of retracted articles (np6024_rw), the number of citations to them (nc9624_to_rw), and the number of citations to retracted articles (nc9624_rw) have been added for each author. Data from the Retraction Watch database was used for this.
Previously in Plagiarism Navigator
- Episode 1: China-Ukraine-Poland — The story of a Chinese scholar who defended a dissertation in Kharkiv, cobbled together from Russian-language works translated into Ukrainian.
- Episode 2: Russia-Tajikistan-Iran — The case of Iranian scholars obtained degrees in Tajikistan (2011–2013) under Russia’s VAK system.
- Episode 3: Russia-Serbia-Turkey-Switzerland-Lithuania — The tale of a Serbian academic who resorted to buying co-authorships and outright plagiarism.
- Episode 4: Russia-USA-Brazil-UK-Switzerland-India — A professor at Sechenov University who infiltrated an Iran-Iraq publication scheme in top Western journals, creating a lucrative paper mill within his own institution.
- Episode 5: Russia-Ukraine-Romania-India — The story of Andriy Vitrenko, Ukraine’s former deputy Minister of Education and Science, whose dissertation and academic papers were found to contain plagiarism.
- Episode 6: Russia-Ukraine — The tale of how wartime cross-border plagiarism became a commercialized scheme to boost academic metrics for Russian and Ukrainian scholars.
- Episode 7: Russia-Tajikistan-France — The journey of a humble Tajik accountant who rose to become the head of the country’s Academy of Sciences.
- Episode 8: Russia-Poland-Australia. — The story of publications in Australian journals involving the Zhukov-Fedyakin family clan from RSSU, former Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, former RSSU Rector Natalia Pochinok, and a Kuban engineer.
- Issue 9: Russia-Ukraine. The creation of large language models has fundamentally improved the quality of automatic translation and provided mass access to corresponding tools worldwide. These advances coincided with the start of Russia’s full-scale military aggression in Ukraine. As a result, a phenomenon has emerged and spread widely, which can be characterized as academic looting.
In his Telegram channel, Academician Alexey Khokhlov for convenience provides a portion of the ranking table concerning Russian scientists. Thus, in 2025, 1069 scientists who indicated a Russian affiliation in their most recent publication entered the top 2% of the world’s leading researchers. The Telegram channel “Ivory Tower Zoo” immediately notices foreign names in the Russian part of the ranking table and once again posted about how in Russia “publication metrics are being inflated in the most unscrupulous way by hiring foreigners of extremely dubious quality.” As a striking example, the channel cites Ural Federal University (UrFU), where such a practice is widely used.
Academician Khokhlov also notes outstanding authors with a large number of retracted articles: “Among Russian authors, the record for the number of such articles is held by Rafael Luque from RUDN. In the ranking of ‘Russian’ scientists, he is placed as high as 16th, but he has 11 retracted articles. He is quite a character; I suggest readers google him themselves. In particular, he ‘became famous’ for managing to publish one article every 37 hours (!) in 2023.”
Let us add that his Hirsch index is at the level of Nobel laureates: 117. In total, the table indicates 57 retracted publications among Russian scientists: 11 for the record holder Rafael Luque, another two with five articles each, three with four articles each, one with three articles, another with two, and 19 more with one retracted publication each. It must be admitted that among the authors of retracted publications, foreigners (“Varangians,” as Academician Khokhlov calls them) are an absolute minority. However, the problem of citation inflation and how much it distorts the ranking data remain unclear.
The ranking compiler, John Ioannidis, as noted above, extracted data on the number of retracted articles from the publicly available Retraction Watch database. This data is far from complete. Unfortunately, there is no single comprehensive database of retracted articles in the world. Each scientific journal, if necessary, publishes a short retraction notice independently, and often that is the end of it. Moreover, the ranking table only accounts for journals from the Scopus database. Furthermore, journal editors do not always decide positively on retracting an article where gross violations of publication ethics have been discovered. Occasionally, such violations are reported on the portal pubpeer.com, where post-publication reviews of already published articles are posted. This is done by volunteers, not systematically, and mainly for open-access journals. For these reasons, the information collected on pubpeer.com also has significant gaps. Nevertheless, the reviews on this portal cover a noticeably larger volume of fake publications in scientific journals than the retraction data in the Retraction Watch database. The category of fake publications includes those with detected plagiarism, data falsification, manipulations with images, spectra, and graphs, purchased co-authorship, and conflicts of interest in the form of direct connections between article authors and the editor or reviewers. It is anticipated that in future versions of the ranking, John Ioannidis will also account for data from the pubpeer.com platform.
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Until he has done so, T-invariant has examined the connections of Russian scientists from the upper part of the ranking with publications that have substantiated negative reviews on the pubpeer.com portal. For this analysis, the top 100 most cited Russian scientists were selected. The analysis focused only on those actively publishing at present (with at least one publication in 2025), for whom the Russian affiliation in the most recent publication is listed first. There were 42 such out of a hundred. Given the significant gaps in pubpeer.com’s coverage… a network approach was applied and primarily checked for negative reviews not only on articles by highly cited Russian scientists but also on articles by their co-authors. We limited ourselves to co-authors from 2025 publications. A similar network approach was recently applied by a group of authors from Northwestern University, who published a large-scale study The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly, in which fragments of graphs of connections between co-authors and editors of falsified publications were demonstrated.
In the list of the most cited Russian researchers, the 1st place rightfully belongs to the physicist, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Bashkortostan, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, professor at the recently established Ufa University of Science and Technology (UUST), Honored Scientist and member of the European Academy of Sciences R.Z. Valiev. In the overall world ranking, Valiev’s rank is 869. Among Russian scientists, Valiev leads by this indicator with a large gap from 2nd and 3rd places in the ranking (ranks 2182 and 2252, respectively) — from 1976 to 2025, he has 1042 publications indexed in Scopus. However, among Valiev’s 2025 publications, there is a significant proportion where Chinese and Iranian affiliations absolutely dominate. Overall, this is not surprising if we consider the reorientation of Russian scientists “to the east” after the start of large-scale aggression against Ukraine in 2022. Nevertheless, T-invariant became interested in these co-authors from the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Among them were names repeatedly noted in negative reviews on pubpeer.com. Thus, one of Valiev’s co-authors in the article Tailoring microstructure and mechanical behavior of Mg-1Zn-0.2Ca alloy through hot extrusion with a cosine-profile die is Ramin Ebrahimi from Shiraz University in Iran, who appeared on pubpeer.com for manipulations with diagrams. Another co-author of Valiev in the publication FeCu–P/carbon dots with multi-enzyme activity catalyze reactive oxygen species production for enhanced antibacterial activity from the Harbin Institute of Technology is the Chinese woman Yujie Feng, who was noticed in conflicts of interest and cases of with images. Yet another co-author of Valiev in the work Superstrength of Nanostructured Ti Grade 4 with Grain Boundary Segregations is the Chinese man Gang Sha, who appeared on pubpeer.com twice, both times for tricks with images. One of his articles, in which he plagiarized a figure from someone else’s work, has already been retracted by now, while the other one — not yet. These are just individual examples of works by Valiev’s foreign co-authors. In reality, there are many more such examples. How is it that a leading Russian scientist has begun to collaborate closely with potential fraudsters? We do not yet have an answer to this question.
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The next actively publishing highly cited Russian scientist whose co-authors’ works have been marked on pubpeer.com with substantiated negative reviews occupies 12th place in the ranking table. This is Artem Oganov with a rank in the world ranking of 10076. As in Valiev’s case, among Oganov’s publications, there is a significant proportion where Chinese and Iranian affiliations also dominate. In one such 2025 publication titled Synthon modularity in crystal structure prediction: designing pomalidomide polymorphs and co-crystals, Oganov’s co-author is the young employee of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran, Alireza Salimi, who was previously noticed twice (in 2018 and 2021) in manipulations with experimental spectra in scientific publications. In turn, Alireza Salimi is a co-author of the professor-mentor from the same university, Ali Nakhaei Pour, who already has six publications on pubpeer.com that received negative reviews for obvious falsifications of experimental spectra. A more prolific co-author and more experienced falsifier for Alireza Salimi was the researcher from Hakim Sabzevari University in Iran, Reza Tayebee, with at least 12 cases of graph falsifications and image manipulations documented on pubpeer.com. A whole Iranian school of article forgeries is traced — a monster devouring the scientific publication space, which with one tentacle has cautiously touched the sphere of Artem Oganov’s scientific works. It must be admitted that this so far single recorded case of Oganov’s co-authorship with an unscrupulous scientist is unlikely to indicate an established practice. It cannot be ruled out that Oganov was added to the article’s author list without his knowledge. Recall that back in 2019, Oganov was included without his knowledge as a co-author in an economics article that was a translational plagiarism of someone else’s earlier work. The journal’s editors later quietly removed the article from view.
Moving down the ranking table, let us stop at the 21st line, occupied by the author of 2377 works, the optics scientist, specialist in medical physics, corresponding member of the RAS Valery Tuchin. Here we again encounter the now-familiar pattern of co-authorship dominated by Chinese affiliations. Thus, in one of the 2025 scientific publications, Tuchin’s co-author is listed as Samad Nejad Ebrahimi from Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, previously noticed in manipulations with data. In another work, Tuchin acts as the corresponding author, the optoelectronics specialist from Huazhong University of Science and Technology Dongyu Li together with his colleague Tingting Yu (also Tuchin’s co-author), both previously flagged in manipulations with images. For example, let us present here one image from their scientific article illustrating the therapeutic effect of the studied drug on the 11th day, which turned out to be a copy of the image of the drug’s effect on the 3rd day, only rotated 180 degrees and slightly scaled down.
Further down the list… at 53rd place, we find of the ranking. It is occupied by Professor Mikhail Sheremet from Tomsk State University Mikhail Sheremet (Hirsch index — 65). In one of his recent scientific articles, Sheremet, in co-authorship with scientists from Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh, uses strange terms that at first glance read like machine translation or AI generation. Thus, the authors use the phrase magnetic specialization where, in meaning, one should write magnetic field; instead of artificial neural network, the authors use manufactured neural network, and so on. Such, at first glance, strange use of established terms in the literature has received the name tortured phrases, and is one of the most convincing pieces of evidence of computer-generated text. Likely, this review on pubpeer.com led to an expression of concern from the journal’s editors — which may well lead to the article’s retraction. Another concern involves suspected manipulation of the peer review process… and irregularities with the reference list. Professor Sheremet’s co-authors only from 2025 publications include scientists from Iran and Saudi Arabia whose works have repeatedly received negative reviews. Thus, the co-author from Saudi Arabia, Mohamed Boujelbene, was simultaneously caught in machinations with data, with images, and bibliographic references. The Iranian co-authors Mohsen Izadi and Ahmad Hajjar were also noticed in manipulation with cited literature, including in co-authorship with Sheremet.
So, four active researchers out of forty-two most cited Russian scientists have become involved in groups of foreign co-authors with questionable reputations. Moreover, in all the publications considered above, the Russian scientist turned out to be the only one or in the absolute minority among representatives of the Middle East and Southeast Asia in the author list. Furthermore, the author lists themselves resemble groups of randomly met people more than stable research teams. Often, a combination of signs, including the use of tortured phrases in the article text, is characteristic of purchased co-authorship. Although in each specific case, we cannot assert this.
The studies themselves, the results of which are published in co-authorship with foreign scientists with not entirely impeccable reputations, so far have not raised any specific doubts. But here there are at least two problems. The first concern is that citations to these publications are highly likely to be stacked by their authors — who have already been repeatedly caught manipulating references — as irrelevant ones to artificially inflate their own (and inevitably their Russian co-authors’) scientometric indicators. The second problem is the price that will likely have to be paid for such dubious collaboration. To demonstrate this mechanism with a live example, let us return to the overall world table of highly cited scientists. In 18th place, we see Gregg Leonard Semenza — an American scientist known as the discoverer of the HIF1A protein. Semenza is a professor at Johns Hopkins University, a member of the National Academies of Sciences and Medicine of the USA. He has 15 retracted articles! Even the aforementioned Rafael Luque from RUDN has fewer. Let us look into one of these publications, where Professor Semenza collaborates with co-authors such as Shaida A. Andrabi or Debangshu Samanta, who is represented on pubpeer.com by ten publications with recorded machinations with images. This unscrupulous practice found its way into an article co-authored with the respected Professor Semenza. Later, Semenza, in response to the journal’s inquiry, acknowledges the error. Debangshu Samanta and most other co-authors refuse to respond to the editor’s inquiry. Thus, at first glance, harmless co-authorship with scientists of questionable reputation can lead to unpleasant consequences. Involvement in the international market of fake scientific articles carries a cost.
It is curious to note that so far we have not encountered cases of outright plagiarism in the works of the most cited Russian scientists. Such a case first appears only on the 79th line of the ranking table, occupied by Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor, Chief Research Scientist at the Research Institute of General Pathology and Pathophysiology Alexander Orekhov. At least four Scopus articles authored by Professor Orekhov were retracted for text plagiarism, as indicated by the corresponding mark in the table of the world’s leading scientists. Let us note that Professor Orekhov’s case is distinct from the four discussed above.
In conclusion, one would like to ask what has prompted some outstanding (and this is said without irony) Russian scientists, whose scientific portfolios already contain hundreds of undoubtedly sound studies, to recently begin engaging co-authors from the Middle East and Southeast Asia with questionable reputations. Is this phenomenon somehow related to the reorientation of Russian science as a whole “to the east”? Or are these just random coincidences? T-invariant does not yet have a definitive answer to this question, but we have a working hypothesis. As Russian science pivoted sharply from Western to Eastern publication venues, scientists inevitably faced intense pressure from the Eastern market of fake scientific works. Nothing similar in scale has ever existed in Western scientific culture, and Russian science as a whole was unprepared for it. T-invariant will continue to monitor the involvement of Russian scientists in the international publication process.