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David Cox, the co-director of a prestigious artificial intelligence lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was scanning an online computer science bibliography in December when he noticed something odd—his name listed as an author alongside three researchers in China whom he didn’t know on two papers he didn’t recognize.

Whatever the reason, it highlights weaknesses in academic publishing, according to Cox and others.

It also reflects a broader lack of rules around the publishing of papers in AI and computer science especially, where many papers are posted online without review beforehand.

“The fundamental challenge that we face is that publishing has, for decades, functioned based on trust,” says Suzanne Farley, research integrity director at Springer Nature.

According to Retraction Watch, a website that tracks cases of academic fraud, one of the Chinese authors, Daming Li, a researcher affiliated with the City University of Macau, blamed the situation on a junior author, Xiang Yao, who is affiliated with a company Zhuhai Da Hengqin Science and Technology Development.

In an earlier example of academic fraud, more than 1,000 papers were retracted between 2012 and 2015 because one or more of the peer reviewers turned out to be fake, according to Retraction Watch.

Cox says the incident shows how poor the quality of some published academic work is.

Brent Hecht, a researcher at Microsoft and Northwestern University who focuses on ethical issues around computer science, says the lax approach is broader.