Editor Quits After Fraud Allegations

Regarding the allegations, which include inventing citations and materials, Kuznetsov maintains that he did nothing wrong. In a lengthy email to The Scientist, Kuznetsov explained why he thinks others were unable to replicate his results. “Actually, nothing is strange about technical difficulties in enzyme function studies which is a pretty complex ‘cooking’—it is not always easy to reproduce (reconfirm) the somebody’s data.” As for researchers’ inability to identify some of the citations Kuznetsov references in his papers, “my only—but no doubt terrible!!! —mistake was that I was naïve enough to publish in the West-appearing periodical the references to articles originally published in Soviet / Russian as well as in Serbian, Bulgarian, . . .  journals in native languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Bulgarian . . .),” many of which ceased publication in the 1990s.

Kuznetsov also explained his motivation in the early 1990s for lecturing on creationism, sponsored by the Institute for Creation Research. “The mere opportunity to went out (escape, if you will . . .) of our Soviet-adopted narrow-minded Darwinian evolution standpoint were taken as an attractive way to study and—who knows—maybe to contribute something to this shiny anti-dogmatic field.”

Gian Marco Rinaldi, a retired math teacher who has exhaustively investigated Kuznetsov, posted more results of his efforts online this month. Kuznetsov’s colleagues, who are implicated in Rinaldi’s investigation, remain editors at ScienceDomain publications. Kuznetsov said he is “sick and tired” of explaining why others cannot verify his work, and “as a matter of fact, I gave up answering such criticisms about 10 years ago.”