Thursday 4 September 2025 – London, UK and Chicago, USA
Researchers associated with a fictitious research network and funding source have collectively netted millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money for current studies from the United States, Japan, Ireland, and other nations. That’s according to investigations led by Digital Science’s VP of Research Integrity, Dr Leslie McIntosh.
The results of her investigations raise serious concerns about the lack of accountability for those involved in questionable research publications.
“This example illustrates how weaknesses in research and publishing systems can be systematically exploited, so that researchers can game the system for their own benefit,” Dr McIntosh says.
Dr McIntosh – one of the co-founders of the Forensic Scientometrics (FoSci) movement – has presented her analysis at this week’s 10th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication in Chicago, in a talk entitled: Manufactured Impact: How a Non-existent Research Network Manipulated Scholarly Publishing.
While not naming the individual researchers involved, Dr McIntosh’s presentation was centered on a group known as the Pharmakon Neuroscience Network, a non-existent body listed on more than 120 research publications from 2019–2022 until being exposed as fictitious. These publications involved 331 unique authors and were associated with 232 organizations and institutions across 40 countries.
Research network raised multiple red flags
The Pharmakon Neuroscience Network functioned as a loosely organized collaboration of predominantly early-career researchers, such as postdoctoral and PhD students, whose publications included:
- Funding acknowledgments with unverifiable organizations
- Use of questionable or unverifiable institutional affiliations
- Suspiciously large citations in a short timeframe
- Globally connected despite a young publication age
“Despite clear concerns about the legitimacy of their work, only three papers have been formally retracted to date,” Dr McIntosh says.
Using Digital Science’s research solutions Dimensions and Altmetric, Dr McIntosh and colleagues have tracked the progress of the authors connected with this network.
“Once the Pharmakon Neuroscience Network was exposed as being fake in 2022, it no longer appeared on publications, but many of the researchers associated with it have continued to publish and attract significant funding for their work,” she says.
Millions in funding for current research
Of the initial 331 researchers associated with the Pharmakon Neuroscience Network’s publications, Dr McIntosh has established that more than 20 currently have funding either as a Principal Investigator or a Co-Principal Investigator from sources where the grant commenced in 2022 or later. During this time, those researchers have collectively been awarded the equivalent of at least US$6.5 million from seven countries: US, Japan, Ireland, France, Portugal, and Croatia, and an undisclosed sum from Russia.
One researcher with more than US$50 million in funding has authorship on one of the Pharmakon papers. It is not clear if he knowingly participated in the network or was part of a former student activity.
“Many of the researchers had grants before and after Pharmakon. This is legitimate, taxpayer money in most instances that are funding very unethical practices,” Dr McIntosh says.
“One aspect we need more time to vet is the possibility that a few of these researchers do not know they were authors on papers within this network. We are still completing this work.”
Of the funded researchers, five had never previously received funding for their research, but following their involvement with the Pharmakon Neuroscience Network they have since been awarded grants from the following sources ($US equivalent):
- Science Foundation Ireland – $649,891
- Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education (Portugal) – $538,904 total
- Croatian Science Foundation – $206,681
- Russian Science Foundation – undisclosed sum
“Here we have evidence that some authors have secured legitimate funding, including large sums of taxpayers’ money, following their participation in questionable research and publication activity,” Dr McIntosh says.
“We can presume that their publication portfolio, no matter how it was obtained, helped in securing this funding from legitimate sources.”
Dr McIntosh says this case has implications across the research system and emphasizes the need for stronger verification, monitoring, and cooperation.
“Although most of these publications remain in circulation and have been cited widely, corrective actions have been limited. This highlights the challenge of addressing such networks once their work is embedded in the scholarly record,” she says.
Recommendations
Dr McIntosh recommends the following:
- Oversight to be reinforced by requiring the use of verified institutional identifiers, such as GRID or ROR, in all publications to ensure affiliations are legitimate and traceable.
- Transparency to be mandated through clearer author contribution statements and verified funding acknowledgments, creating a more reliable and accountable record of how research is conducted and supported.
- Monitoring mechanisms should be improved by supporting the adoption of forensic scientometrics, which can detect unusual collaboration patterns or questionable authorship practices before they become systemic.
“By addressing these gaps, governments, publishers and research institutions alike can help protect the integrity of the research system and ensure that trust in science is maintained,” Dr McIntosh says.
See further detail about this investigation in Dr McIntosh’s blog post: From Nefarious Networks to Legitimate Funding.
About Digital Science
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Media contact
David Ellis, Press, PR & Social Manager, Digital Science: Mobile +61 447 783 023, d.ellis@digital-science.com
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