Don't really know how authorship of scientific articles work.
Trying to figure out what exactly the article was supposed to be about- the release of free radicals from a particular type of microplastic that was more toxic than other forms of microplastics?
Sounds worse than the "study" that started the whole idiotic "vaccines-cause-autism-don't-vaccinate-your-child" hysteria nonsense.

Last edited Fri Jul 10, 2026, 10:59 AM - Edit history (1)

Edit/Correction:

Mr. Djebbari worked for Professor Baikun Li. and was first author.

He HAS been fired by Dr. Li, and presumably the other coauthor, who is the Provost at U Conn.

I will thus edit all of the incorrect information I have posted

The discovery of the fraud originated in the University of Connecticut's Research Integrity office, probably after a tip, possibly from one of the authors she plagiarized, or even a co-author.

It's a very serious matter.

The retraction talks about "as previously requested by the corresponding and senior co-author", which I think is Li; the "first author" admitted to fabrication and plagiarism, which I think is Djebbari. The orcid.org link shows Li has been a professor since 2006; that for Djebbari shows him as a PhD candidate since 2021: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-3890-6522

I'd suspect she's his supervisor; he did the dodgy stuff, and she didn't catch it (whether someone else told her, or she figured it out herself, who knows. Or worse, she had known, and someone else went public, and she had to admit it)

...Dr. Li.

I thank you profusely for the correction, offering the weak excuse that I was posting as the Ambien kicked in, something about which I should know better by now.

Apologies.

I will correct the relevant posts, including the OP.

...as I was addressing an outbreak of insomnia.

Seriously, this is hard to believe. Experiments might be hard to reproduce, but DFT calculations could be checked by researchers everywhere. How long did she expect this to evade detection ?

Who am I kidding ? Having read "Betrayers of the Truth*", I'm no longer shocked to hear of scientific fraud in scientific publication. My former (late) thesis advisor had an entire article plagiarized, and published as a review article under another author's name -- with almost no changes in the text.




*It's hard to imagine how much revision would be needed to update this book for the era of the Internet and Fake Intelligence (FI).

That’s what makes it better than religion.