I was reading Wikipedia, as one does, and came across the article on hypnosis. The opening section contains this paragraph:
During hypnosis, a person is said to have heightened focus and concentration and an increased response to suggestions. Hypnosis usually begins with a hypnotic induction involving a series of preliminary instructions and suggestions. The use of hypnosis for therapeutic purposes is referred to as “hypnotherapy”, while its use as a form of entertainment for an audience is known as “stage hypnosis”, a form of mentalism.
I clicked the link to read the article about stage hypnosis, and the page is covered in [citation needed] notices. In particular, I was curious about the fact that there was a full on block quote with zero citation or attribution, so I did some googling and came across a paper on hypnosis. I started to read the abstract and somehow it seemed familiar:
During hypnosis, a person is said to have heightened focus and concentration and an increased response to suggestions. Hypnosis usually begins with a hypnotic induction involving a series of preliminary instructions and suggestions. The use of hypnosis for therapeutic purposes is referred to as “hypnotherapy”, while its use as a form of entertainment for an audience is known as “stage hypnosis,” a form of mentalism.
I looked further down and saw that, sure enough, almost the entire paper was copied and pasted without changes from the Wikipedia article (which, per its revision history, was written much earlier).
The journal it was published in, the World Journal of Pharmaceutical Research, is a little too eager to present themselves as reputable. Within each published paper they mention their impact factor and ISO 9001 certification. Their impact factor is an SJIF (Scientific Journal Impact Factor), a metric which purports to quantify the importance and influence a publication has within a scholarly field. Much could be said about impact factors and their effect on research and scholarship, and I’ll just summarize the situation here. The concept of an impact factor (IF) was developed as a tool for research librarians to decide which journals to index in their library. It’s calculated statistically for a single paper based on the number of times that paper was cited, and the IF of a journal is just an average of its publications’ IFs. There are some flaws with the concept itself, for example individual articles’ IFs are not distributed normally and outliers can skew the mean significantly. After the metric came into use, however, many started to see the IF as an indirect measure of a journal’s overall quality. More recently, I’m not sure everyone is aware that it’s not a direct measure of quality. Academic prestige (and career advancement) is strongly associated with being published in high-impact journals.
It’s no surprise, then, that unscrupulous actors would take advantage of high IFs giving the appearance of quality and cook up bogus numbers for their predatory journals. As dubious a metric as IF is, there is really only one (more or less the “original” one) that is widely considered trustworthy, and that is the one calculated and published by Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters). The SJIF, the version used by the World Journal of Pharmaceutical Research, is published by… SJIFactor.com.
As for the ISO certification that the journal is clearly very proud of, while ISO certifications can be prestigious in a way, this particular standard doesn’t have anything to do with science, academia, research, or publishing. ISO 9001 is a standard for quality management systems (QMS). This may at first sound promising, but in fact this standard has to do with organizational practices, customer service, and regulatory requirements. This means that the journal as a business meets those standards. ISO 9001 certifying bodies are neither equipped to nor interested in evaluating the quality of the science being published. Still, it is mildly surprising for them to have such a certification (I’m taking them at their word that they do in fact have it).
Anyway, I had a look at the journal’s website and noticed a “best paper award” for one Dr. Dhrubo Jyoti Sen. He was one of the coauthors on the plagiarized paper. Curious, I read the “best paper” which was about 3D bioprinting. Two of its authors, Kushal Nandi and Dr. Dhananjoy Saha, were the other two coauthors with Sen on the first paper. This bioprinting paper had another coauthor, Dr. Kishor Dholwani. The acknowledgments (presumably written by Dholwani) says about Sen, Nandi, and Saha, “The hard work of this three made this article beautiful one.”
This one, too, is plagiarized from Wikipedia, even using the same image that’s on the Wikipedia page. Bizarrely, the pdf of the paper links this image to its Wikimedia Commons page, which links to the Wikipedia article it’s used in, which has the same text as the paper. That seems like a pretty significant slip-up, but on the other hand, copying entire Wikipedia articles verbatim is middle-school-caliber plagiarism, and there was never any chance of anyone taking this paper seriously.
A web of lies
Sen is on the editorial board of the World Journal of Pharmaceutical Research and also of the World Journal of Advance Healthcare Research, a near-identical journal where he has also published Wikipedia articles. Looking into this more revealed that there are several journals that appear to be run by the same people and look nearly identical with different color schemes:
- World Journal of Pharmaceutical Research*
- World Journal of Advance Healthcare Research*
- World Journal of Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences*
- European Journal of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences*
- International Journal of Modern Pharmaceutical Research
- World Journal of Engineering Research and Technology
* Indicates Sen is on the editorial board
It seems that Sen and colleagues are rather old-fashioned in their plagiarism by not using AI. Based on non-scientifically checking papers from these journals with a free AI detection tool, it looks like most of them are AI-generated.
It’s clear what the grift is. People who want the prestige of having their research published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, whether for their career, ego, or some other reason, create fake papers and pay these journals to publish their “work” without any meaningful review at all. The journal names sound reputable enough, and they all have their SJIF and ISO 9001 certification plastered all over the place, so to someone outside the world of research and academic publishing they could come across as legitimate. In this case, it’s not much of a concern what their contents is. While virtually all of it is plagiarized and much of it is certainly false information, there doesn’t seem to be any conspiracy theory or pseudoscience angle. Moreover, I doubt most of the papers published ever get read by anyone.
It’s interesting to me that there isn’t a clear line between legitimate academics and fraudsters. Sen teaches at Techno India University in Kolkata, a private university with a dubious reputation, but it’s clear that not everyone associated with the university is a fraudster. Across all the individuals on the editorial boards and who publish in these journals, many of them are associated with apparently legitimate institutions.
Sen himself has one other notable presence on the internet, and that is a YouTube video about him that at the time of writing is three years old and has less than 200 views. The video is on a channel called “Record Owner” with less than 600 subscribers, and the content just lists his various awards and accomplishments. Looking into Record Owner, it’s clear that it’s just someone you can pay to make a video talking up your alleged achievements. It’s a bit like the Guinness Book of World Records if the Guinness Book of World Records had a readership of 600 people. Upon looking into the awards listed for Sen, I discovered they were awards given out by Record Owner.
I never did find the origin of the unsourced block quote on Wikipedia.
Sources
Wikipedia: Hypnosis – Stage hypnosis – Impact factor – 3D bioprinting
Journals: WJPR – WJAHR – WJPLS – IJMPR – WJERT – EJPBS
Sen, D. J., Nandi, K., & Saha, D. (2022). Hypnosis: The network to control one’s mind. World Journal of Pharmaceutical Research, 11(4), 1867–1888. https://doi.org/10.20959/wjpr20224-23661
Dholwani, K., Nandi, K., Sen, D. J., & Saha, D. (2022). 3D bioprinting: A new ray of hope in the field of medical science. World Journal of Pharmaceutical Research, 11(11), 1618–1634. https://doi.org/10.20959/wjpr202211-25326
YouTube: Dr. Dhrubo Jyoti Sen | Incredible Academician of India | Record Owner | Home of Worlds Records
Techno India University (see also reviews on Google Maps)
Photo by Orhan Pergel
thoughts on mind 