There's a certain degree of cheating you see in academic settings. Every now and then, you get papers with identical, really knucklehead mistakes, or you see cases like Harvard's trying not to severely punish 125 students who cheated on a take home exam. One of the reasons I love Retraction Watch is that it not only publicizes scientific misconduct, it challenges people to think and talk about ethics.
They've written several articles about what I think might be the most effort expended cheating in science.
HyungIn Moon, a plant compound researcher in the Department of Medical Biotechnology at Dong-A University in Korea, has had 35 papers retracted. That's unusual, but what's really brazen is the reason retraction. Some papers it's not clear why they were retracted, but for most it's because Moon made up email addresses for his "suggested reviewers" and then reviewed the publications himself.
He got caught, not because his self-reviews were so favorable, but because they were so fast. An editor noticed that peer review comments for his papers were coming back within 24 hours. Reviewers usually take several weeks to a month, so this definitely jumped out.
Surprisingly, Dr Moon still has his job as an assistant professor. He seems to think it's the journals' fault for not checking on the reviewers more carefully. One editor, Emilio Jirillo, resigned from Immunopharmacology and Immunotoxicology, which published 20 of Moon's papers.
Moon isn't the only person to try to fake his own reviews. Guang-Zhi He, a parasitologist in China, and and a group of mathematicians in Iran have also had retractions after fake reviewers were discovered. The first of these cases was reported 3 months ago, so I imagine there will be more coming as editors go back and check email addresses match the names of real reviewers.
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