The news site states that Taylor & Francis is investigating the error-riddled article, which was published in May in the Journal of Further and Higher Education, one of its many peer-reviewed journals. The authors were identified as Anastasia Christou and Steve Lambert, coeditors of the journal, and the journal’s deputy editor Rosalind Latiner Raby.
“Of 31 references in the editorial, at least nine are nonexistent articles or contain incorrect journals or inaccurate author names,” Retraction Watch states. “The problematic references include real scholars linked to articles they didn’t write and real journal titles associated with the wrong authors …. Fake references can be a sign of artificial intelligence use since large language models, such as ChatGPT, are known to hallucinate references.”
Christou is a sociology professor at Middlesex University London. Lambert is Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Chester. Raby is director of California Colleges for International Education.
The notoriety surrounding the case – or lack thereof – stands in stark contrast to the recent controversy surrounding the alleged plagiarism of the late Jason Arday, another UK researcher who was found dead a little more than a week after he resigned from his post at the University of Cambridge. Arday was often identified in news stories as the youngest Black professor at Cambridge.
Whereas Arday’s family attributed his death to a “campaign of sustained abuse,” outside of the Retraction Watch article, very little has been written about Christou, Lambert and Raby.
When the trio came on as editors at the Journal of Further and Higher Education in 2025, they wrote that they “feel particularly energized to see the Journal of Further and Higher Education thrive.” They also touted the journal’s “rigorous double-masked peer review process” as the reason behind its high ranking.
