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.
