A paper that was previously rejected due to concerns about AI authorship and fabricated citations was published, almost unchanged, until a former peer reviewer discovered it and prompted a retraction.
Dr. Jacqueline Ewart, a communications professor at Griffith University, Australia, was alerted in April through Google Scholar about the publication of a paper she had once reviewed and recommended for rejection. The article, titled “Monitoring the development of community radio: A comprehensive bibliometric analysis,” was published by World of Media, a journal run by the journalism faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia.
Ewart had reviewed an earlier version of the same manuscript for the Journal of Radio and Audio Media (JRAM), where she raised serious concerns about potential AI-generated content and several fabricated references, including one citation falsely attributed to her. Despite these issues, the paper resurfaced in World of Media with only a minor tweak: the word “progression” in the title had been changed to “development.”
In an email to World of Media Editor-in-Chief Anna Gladkova on April 7, Ewart outlined the concerns she had previously raised during peer review. The editorial team responded quickly, promising an internal investigation and rechecking the manuscript for plagiarism. However, by May 2, the paper was still online, prompting Ewart to follow up. Shortly afterward, the journal removed the article and placed a notice on its website indicating that an inquiry was underway.
One of the paper’s authors, Amit Verma of Manipal University Jaipur in India, admitted that the team had made only minimal changes between the original and the published versions. He also confirmed the use of AI tools, stating they were applied for grammar and style improvement, and emphasized the use of standard bibliometric tools for data collection.
Regarding the issue of fake references, Verma attributed the discrepancies to the instability of sources found on platforms such as Shodhganga and Google Scholar. However, this failed to account for a fabricated citation to a non-existent 2017 article falsely attributed to Ewart.
Despite the issues, Verma said the journal has invited the authors to submit a revised version of the manuscript.
World of Media has not issued a public statement beyond confirming the ongoing internal inquiry.