[1/n] Anatomy of a certain Swain. Super misinformation shredder thread. As you have guessed it, it is none other than @ashoswai or Ashok Swain. His Wikipedia page looks impressive [see screenshot]. However, it is inflated! Let’s look at his peer reviewed articles.

[2/n] Here is the google scholar profile of Swain, For a someone who has published his first article in 1991, the Citations[right side of the screenshot] 2458 is mediocre.

[3/n] Lets, 1st look at Some other profiles. Here is a researcher from a comparable field having a lot more citations.

[4/n] the quality of publications of the Swain . The highest cited article of Swain is in the unknown, never heard off shady “The Journal of Modern African Studies”. It doesn’t even figure in Quartile 4. There are 4 quartiles in academic publishing. Q1 is highest and Q4 lowest.

[5/n] His one of the Q1 article which was published way back in 1996. Its questionable why he would reduce his quality of publication by publishing in an unlisted journal after publishing in Q1? Lets dissect this article a bit.

[6/n] In the same publication, Swain says he interviewed only 6 individuals. 6 by no means is a sample size. So I needed to check the reputation of this journal back in 1996.

[7/n] Until2 yrs ago this was a lowly ranked journal see screen shot;explains how a sample size of 6 qualified as Scientific data if at all. There r more such gold standard by Dr. Swain & the journals which accepted his mediocre research[ PS: I scratch ur back, u scratch mine].

[8/n] Swain published in one decent journal [Screenshots]; Lets dig deeper into the issue with this article.

[9/n] Look at table 1 in this article, it is data processed from FAO World bank stats. Implying Ashok is writing articles base don somebody else’s experimental data[OS]. No harm in it, but, it is not a research really! This is the prime issue with his other articles as well.

[10/n] Another issue with this paper is the age of this data from Food And Agriculture Organization(FAO) of UN. Its from 1997. If u r writing articles based on a data from another decade, chances are it is most likely a junk article. I have personally rejected several such junks.

[11/n] Most of Ashok’s articles are followup articles, there is not a single ground breaking article. The articles citing his articles are also of similar nature.

[12/n] One decent publication of Swain is Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. However he is the third author. Feargal Cochrane is the corresponding author as he is the only person with his email on it. Implying Swain is an intruder in this publication.

[13/n] One of the other highly cited article by Swain is “The Nile River Basin Initiative: too many cooks, too little broth” in the SAIS Review by Johns Hopkins University. Does have an impact factor nor has a quartile.

[14/n] Next article we look at is Water wars: fact or fiction? Published in Futures. Atleast has a quartile. When Swain published in 2001, it was ranked Q3. In this article he cited 7 of his own articles.

[15/n] This is a dangerous recipe if self plagiarism in Engineering and Sciences field. Just playing with words is not a good practice. Swain is lucky that he has not been noticed by retraction watch.

[16/n] Even if this isn’t self-plagiarism it still qualifies as writing junk articles to build reputation. you cant reproduce data of tables like that, without even citing the article where it first appeared. Writing multiple articles with same data is unethical.