Something is out there

I'm searching MathSciNet for people to review a submission dealing with MS-projections. There are people out there with papers on them, but very few of them have recent papers. I'm not saying they don't have recent papers dealing with the projections; they don't have any recent papers at all. And these are not old people. These are people with only 7 - 10 publications. People whose first publications are less than 15 years ago.

I think someone is removing these researchers. Killing them off. It is worrisome.

It seems a competitive field. There are only so many stars you can append to MS. Only so many trivial generalisations you can make so that the old proofs still hold without having to do anything. Competition is getting fierce before the journals start rejecting these derivative works out-right, and the authors will be forced to go back to the old literature and find another long lost result that they can copy.

I fear one author, at least, has had enough of this, and has decided to eliminate the competition.

I contact one of the authors of the submitted work, and ask him what he was doing during the night of 2012. He claims that he was home alone working on projective inverses. Likely story. No one works on inverses alone. Not characterising them. No one that isn't Russian. This author is not Russian.

It is suspicious, but I'm not equipped to deal with research related homicides. This is perhaps why many of the the bigger journals now require a statement about conflicting interests. I don't see people admitting conflicts of interest, let alone their illegal removal of them, but who am I to judge what the big journals do. Who am I to stick my nose into the cutthroat world of MS-projections? I just edit a regional journal. I can take a stand against blatant plagiarism, but that, I guess, is where I'll draw the line.