Journal retracted 46 articles in one fell swoop for faked peer review

In Retraction Watch world, it’s like finding long-buried and forgotten treasure.

A now-defunct journal retracted nearly four dozen papers in a single sweep, citing questions about the integrity of the peer review process for the articles. 

The Open Automation and Control Systems Journal, formerly published by Bentham, released a list of 46 articles, which it published in 2015, by researchers from various institutions in China. Bentham dates the retractions to 2016. We learned about the case from a commenter to our recent post about a mysterious incident of plagiarism. 

According to Bentham: 

The Publisher and Editor have retracted these articles [1–46] in accordance with good ethical practices. After thorough investigations we believe that the peer review process was compromised.

Among the papers in the list are: 

• Polarization ghost imaging system based on compressed sensing 
• The research of face recognition method based on sparse representation and feature selection

And, our personal favorite, Grey relational degree-based universities football teaching development trend study, by Li Xi, of the School of Physical Sciences at Hefei Normal University, whose abstract reads: 

In contemporary, football is loved by youth, and youth football teaching is base of a country football development. With respect to this, the paper carries out concrete study on Chinese youth football teaching. The paper makes specific analysis of Chinese sports teaching football course reformation status, and analyzes some schools add football course into syllabus or not, and then finds out that most of Chinese schools have added football teaching, which shows Chinese football has already attracted schools attention; by interviewing relative scholars, teachers, school leaders, analyzes data and gets in Chinese football teaching development, it has faculty shortage, lacks of national investment, which is considerable bad for Chinese football development; by establishing grey relational degree mathematical model, analyzes Chinese youth demands trend, and proposes that Chinese youth tends to watch football match, and lacks of interests in techniques, tactics learning. The paper provides theoretical guarantee for Chinese football development, and provides correlation effective opinions.

That kind of mess deserves a red card. 

We emailed Bentham for comment — and, in particular, whether the demise of the journal was linked to the bulk retractions — but have not heard back. 

To date, we’ve identified about 900 retractions resulting from rigged peer review. If you’re not familiar with how the scam works, here’s a guide.

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