IN 1975, a paper titled “Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc³He” was published in the journal Physical Review Letters written by JH Hethe-rington and FDC Willard. Hethe-rington eventually became a respected physicist who conducted pioneering research. FDC Willard was a cat. Specifically, a cat named Felis Domesticus Chester Willard
Hetherington originally wrote the paper alone, using the royal “we” throughout, but found out the journal would only publish papers using plural pronouns if the paper had multiple authors. Rather than retype the manuscript, Hetherington simply added as co-author a roommate that occasionally rubbed against his legs while purring.
When it was revealed years later that the second author was not human, Hetherington’s paper attracted plenty of attention, almost all of it good-natured. It was an inside joke that everyone appreciated because, truthfully, the science itself was good, and that’s what matters.
However, what happened recently at a conference in Denmark was no laughing matter. At the nimbly titled 14th Meeting of the International Society on Pneumonia and Pneu-mococcal Diseases in Copenhagen this May, Indonesian medical researcher Wa Ode Dwi Danin-grat experienced an unusual sense of déjà vu.
Two women presenters at separate sessions on the same day looked and sounded remarkably alike, despite appearing under different names, wearing different name tags, and even different- coloured hijabs. The next day, the already suspicious Wa Ode Dwi tracked the same woman to yet another presentation, this time under a third identity.
Wa Ode Dwi later discovered from conference organisers that, in fact, four purported researchers had each received travel grants. At this conference, these covered return airfare and five nights’ accommodation, and other administrative fees. Travel grants for European scientific conferences typically range between €1,000 and €1,500 (RM4,664 and RM6,996).
These discoveries were then shared by Wa Ode Dwi’s colleague on an Instagram post titled “Merusak nama Indonesia di mata dunia (Damaging Indo-nesia’s reputation in the eyes of the world)”.
While damaging, it is only the latest in a series of academic integrity controversies in Indonesia. In 2024, the former dean of Universitas Nasional was accused of adding dozens of Malaysian academics as co-authors to papers without their knowledge or consent. He also allegedly had published around 160 papers in a single year.
In science, trust is the currency. The reality is that very few people can independently verify, let alone fully understand, highly specialised research published in academic journals. We therefore must trust the messenger in order to trust the message.
But once people begin questioning the integrity of the researchers, it’s a poison that spreads to everything they publish.
Malaysia isn’t immune to this sort of chicanery. In 2018, a study by researchers at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) interviewed 21 academics from Malaysian public universities. Many described unethical authorship practices as “quite common” within their faculties, adding that such incidents were rarely reported.
Among the practices identified were guest or “honorary” authorship, where someone’s name is added out of courtesy or because it will improve a paper’s chances of publication, and mutual-support authorship, where academics agree to add one another’s names to artificially raise their publication count.
It must be noted that this wasn’t some in-depth exposé by investigative journalists; they were academics speaking openly with a researcher. People in academia know this is happening, but nobody really seems to be doing or saying much about it.
Perhaps people feel that speaking up won’t make a difference. Wa Ode Dwi said she and her colleague took their allegations to social media because they did not know where to make an official report. One must also wonder if they felt going public would prove more effective than using internal complaint mechanisms.
But perhaps the larger problem lies in the incentives. Universities increasingly evaluate academics through key performance indicators that include publication targets and research output, all of which influence promotions, grants, and institutional rankings. It is clear that this has become the culture, both in Indonesia and Malaysia, because it’s actually become beneficial to keep quiet about unethical behaviour.
Given Malaysia’s ambitions of becoming a knowledge economy, we must recognise that innovation ultimately depends on credible research, and therefore it is in our national interest to ensure that academic integrity is not compromised.
However, the independence of Malaysian academia is already under scrutiny. UKM’s Dr Sharifah Munirah Alatas, co-author of Ivory Tower Reform, a critique of Malaysia’s academic system, recently wrote on social media that “Malaysia badly needs more scholars and university leaders who are not playthings of politicians”. Meanwhile (and rather ironically), former minister Khairy Jamaluddin criticised Malaysian academics for remaining silent while misinformation about the nation’s history continues to spread.
The truth is, if we spend all our time and effort trying to finagle the name written on a paper instead of the research written within it, then it won’t just be authorship that has gone to the cats and dogs, but public trust in academia itself.
Logic is the antithesis of emotion but mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi’s theory is that people need both to make sense of life’s vagaries and contradictions. Write to Dzof at lifestyle@thestar.com.my. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.
