Nuts

Nuts are prevalent in the Journal of Nuts. Some (perhaps all) of its articles have interesting authors. One, at least, of the authors of the following article is notably, almost nuttily prolific. That article is:

“How Did Globalization Boost the Nuts Production in Indonesia?” Eko Hendarto, Sandhir Sharma, Maria Jade Catalan Opulencia, Mohammed Khudair Hasan, Aiman Mohammed Baqir Al-Dhalimy, Iskandar Muda, Mohammed Abed Jawad, Krishanveer Singh, and Noor Abdul Ameer Jabar, Journal of Nuts, vol. 13, no. 3, September 2022, pp.199-210.

Co-author Maria Jade Catalan Opulencia is mentioned in a new report, in the Retraction Watch blog, called “After a sleuth reveals a paper with authorships advertised for sale, it’s retracted.” That report quotes an academic detective named Nick Wise:

For example, Wise noted, Maria Jade Catalan Opulencia, one of the authors of the retracted paper whose affiliation is listed as the college of business administration at Ajman University in the United Arab Emirates, “suddenly published over 50 papers last year, despite having barely published before, and many of them have matching Facebook adverts on Pubpeer.”

Opulencia is listed as a coauthor on three additional retracted papers about cancer biology, fuel cells, and nanoelectronics for which Wise identified authorships for sale. Her most recent paper on Google Scholar indicates it was published in Linguistica Antverpiensa, a Belgian linguistics journal that we previously reported had been targeted by hijackers attempting to sneak paper mill manuscripts into databases like Scopus under the auspices of a legitimate journal.

Praise for Opalancia

We found a 2016 blog item (by Roger B Rueda) praising Opalencia. Rueda wrote: “She is indeed of the highest calibre. A gold laid waste by the university in the Philippines which didn’t understand her worth and importance.” Rueda’s blog item carries this headline: “Dr Maria Jade Catalan Opulencia and her other colleague nominees for the 2016 Global Top 50 Educators Award”.

It’s not just nuts.

Opalancia is credited with co-authorship on an impressively, delightfully wide variety of research papers, as you can see by doing a search with Google Scholar.