An associate professor at Moscow’s Sechenov University has embedded himself in an Iran-Iraq-linked publication scheme involving top academic journals in Europe and the U.S., creating what appears to be a well-oiled operation for selling the authorship of scientific papers. At the center of the scheme is Dmitry Bokov, a pharmaceutical chemistry specialist at the First Moscow State Medical University (Sechenov University). Bokov allegedly paid to be listed as a co-author on plagiarized and rewritten papers sold through various "exchanges", then he used those same platforms to get the articles published in reputable Western scientific journals – which, for unclear reasons, accepted them. Bokov published hundreds of such papers and strategically paid for citations in other plagiarized works in order to inflate his h-index and other scholarly metrics.
Academics who publish such papers are often awarded grants from their home institutions, but Sechenov University likely did not object to the investment, as Bokov’s "work" effectively opened up a channel into top-tier journals. Investigators found that over the course of five years, the young researcher published 260 papers. In 2022 alone, he authored 100 articles – averaging two per week.
