cv - What to do after I was named as co-author on a paper, without my consent?

A few years ago, I found a conference paper, of which I was a co-author, being re-published as an article in a (not highly ranked) journal. It was a textbook example of plagiarism, copy-pasting whole sections and using figures from our paper, which the author did not even cite. The author came from a foreign country and was an associate professor.

My co-author wrote an email to the author who committed plagiarism and asked him for an explanation. After a while, he admitted his misconduct (a soft version of it); his explanation was that he forgot to cite our paper. As a settlement, he suggested a new article to be written together with us. Without consent, he wrote a new article (in his language) and published it in another lowly ranked journal, putting himself as first author. I was listed as a co-author without being able to comment on the idea of writing this paper and without approving its content before publication. For me, it looked pretty much like a (self-)plagiarism---a translation of the original English paper. But, at that time, we did not want to further complicate this weird situation.

My question is how to deal now with this article I co-authored and could even be treated as a kind of self-plagiarism. May/should/must I exclude it from my CV?

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PS. The publication of the journal we are talking about stopped five years ago. So, it is not possible to contact the editor any more.

Answer

Given that the publisher shut the journal down five years ago, there's not much more you can do at this point to have it removed or retracted at the source.

Instead, I would disown/disavow the paper by not including it in your CV and by making sure it is de-listed from your Google Scholar, Web of Sciences, SCOPUS, and other author citation index listing services.

This is easy in Google Scholar by deleting the article from your page in your author-view. For SCOPUS you have to send a correction request:

The same for Web of Science

For both Scopus and WoS, I would list the correction that you are not the same person as the author listed as the author of the paper. It would help communications with both services if you know your author identifier (Scopus Author Identifier, etc.). Something like the following should work:

Dear SCOPUS -

My author identifier is _________. One of the articles listed in my author record (____________ in the journal ________; DOI _________) was not written by me. Please delist it from my author record.

John Doe (Author identifier ________).

_{p.s. This is actually not an uncommon problem. Adding Famous Authors® to subpar articles is a form of authorial pagerank-jacking.}