Macau scholar implicated in academic fraud

At least two academic papers authored by a researcher affiliated with the City University of Macau and published in the journal Springer Nature, erroneously listed David Cox, a scholar serving at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as a co-author. Retraction Watch, an online platform that examines academic fraud, noted the matter in an earlier published report.
Cox is the IBM Director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an industry-academic collaboration between IBM and MIT. His research focus has been on artificial intelligence.
Cox first noticed the two papers, which he was not associated with in any capacity, had listed his name, email and picture, on DBLP, a bibliography website that tracks articles run by computer scientists.
“I just discovered two papers (in a @SpringerNature journal) that have my name on the author list, but which I definitely did not contribute to. The rest of the author list is Chinese people I have never heard of,” Cox commented on his Twitter account in December 2020.
He also tweeted that “the whole thing is yucky” and he felt “kind of violated” as “it’s one of those journals that has the pictures of the authors at the end, and there I am….”
This week, Cox told Wired magazine that it wasn’t until he threatened legal action that Springer Nature, the publisher of Cluster Computing, removed his name from the two papers and issued a retraction. He was told that the journal had received an email confirming him as an author, although that came through a Hotmail address.
The two fraudulent articles were titled “A FCM cluster: cloud networking model for intelligent transportation in the city of Macau” and “Mobile network intrusion detection for IoT system based on transfer learning algorithm” and were published by Springer Nature, an English-German academic publishing company, in October 2017 and January 2018, respectively.
Both of the concerned papers were authored by Daming Li, a researcher affiliated with the City University of Macau.
According to ScienceDirect, a website offering scientific and medical publications, Li received a doctorate from the City University of Macau in 2014. Currently, he is a Research Fellow with the Postdoctoral Research Center of China (Hengqin) Pilot Free Trade Zone and Information Centre of Hengqin New Area, and a Research Fellow with the City University of Macau.
The Times contacted Li yesterday via e-mail and asked about the matter, but didn’t receive any response.
When asked by Retraction Watch about the rationale behind putting Cox’s name on the papers, Li pointed the finger to another author, Xiang Yao, who was a junior researcher, saying that “Xiang Yao once said that he listened to David’s good ideas, so Xiang added David’s name.”
“Xiang has been dismissed [by his University and Research Insitutions] based on his words and deeds,” Li added.