Kervarc-Genre had never come across such blatant fraud, she said, and was unsure about what to do, so turned to PubPeer to report the findings. Others soon joined, uncovering more troubling patterns in the work. In total, 43 papers have been flagged on PubPeer, all sharing a common author: Suman L. Jain, a scientist at the CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum in Dehradun.
Responding to the PubPeer comments pointing out the copy-and-paste, Jain wrote she was “extremely sorry”, and said her institute didn’t have the right equipment to perform the experiments at the time. According to Jain, her students obtained the data from other institutes, and she was shown hard copies when the manuscript was being prepared.
Jain acknowledged the irregularities, stating on PubPeer she agreed with the concerns and was trying to contact the student responsible for the experiments, who had left her group a year earlier. Then in August 2024, she wrote that she had submitted a correction to the editor, although none appears on the article page. In an email a spokesperson for Elsevier, which publishes the journal, said they had not received any request for correction to the article by the authors. However, the publisher is investigating this paper, along with 13 others flagged on PubPeer.
