A total of 436 papers in two Springer Nature journals are being subjected to expressions of concern, in the latest case of special issues — in this case, “topical collections” — likely being exploited by rogue editors or impersonators.
The move follows the discovery, as we reported in August, of more than 70 papers in a collection in one of the journals, the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, that referred to subjects — aerobics and running wear, for example — seemingly unrelated to geology. That sleuthing began on PubPeer and was broadened by Alexander Magazinov and Guillaume Cabanac. We have now learned that Springer Nature had already been looking into the issues.
Here’s the notice that appears with a list of more than 400 articles from three different topical collections for the Arabian Journal of Geosciences:
Following the publication of this topical collection of the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, the Publisher became aware of serious research integrity concerns within the collection. The peer review process was not carried out in accordance with the Publisher’s peer review policy (see https://www.springer.com/gp/editorial-policies/peer-review-policy-process), and may have been deliberately manipulated. All articles in this topical collection are currently being assessed. The Publisher will take further editorial action where appropriate, once this investigation is complete.
The authors were informed of the publication of this Editorial Expression of Concern using email addresses provided at submission.
Two dozen more expressions of concern with essentially the same language are being issued for a special issue of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.
All The majority of the authors of the papers appear to be from China.
In a statement to Retraction Watch, Alison Mitchell, Chief Journals Officer at Springer Nature said:
The dedicated Research Integrity team at Springer Nature is constantly searching for any irregularities in the publication process, supported by a range of tools, including an in-house-developed detection tool. Recently, the team detected guest-edited issues in two journals where the publishing process may have been deliberately compromised – three guest-edited issues of the Arabian Journal of Geosciences and one guest-edited issue of Personal & Ubiquitous Computing. We immediately launched an investigation, and are placing Editorial Expressions of Concerns on the issues in order to alert the community to our concerns. Ahead of taking this action, all authors and editors were informed (using the email addresses supplied at submission). We also alerted COPE and will continue to share information and evidence that may be useful to other publishers and institutions where appropriate.
Protecting the integrity of the scientific record sits at the heart of our company and a paper by paper investigation is underway for the four issues. We remain dedicated to finding ways to guard against deliberate interference in the publishing process, and are putting additional checks in place and increasing publisher oversight of guest-edited issues to ensure that our policies are being adhered to.
Mitchell added:
Problematic content affects the whole of the academic publishing industry. It can be the result of genuine human error or systematic attempts to subvert the publication process. The publication process is inherently based on trust and, unfortunately, this has led to unethical individuals and groups working to exploit the process through the use of inauthentic content, peer reviews or identities. These subversion efforts are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and now increasingly involve the use of artificial intelligence technology. Our work to prevent similar issues occurring in future is therefore evolving too. Springer Nature has for many years been building and expanding a specialist team dedicated to investigating research integrity matters. We have also been developing and utilising both internally and externally developed technology, including AI powered software, in addition to working with whistleblowers and institutions.
When we reported on this case in August, Sheldon Williamson, a Canada Research Chair who studies energy systems and who was the “responsible editor” for the Arabian Journal of Geosciences’ “Topical Collection on Environment and Low Carbon Transportation,” told us that his email — a non-institutional one he uses for editorial work — was hacked. He said the journal would retract dozens of papers.
But Chris Graf, who recently joined Springer Nature as Research Integrity Director, a role similar to one he held at Wiley, said today was too early to make that call:
Protecting the integrity of the scientific record sits at the heart of our company and a paper by paper investigation of the articles contained in the four issues is underway. It is important not to prejudge the outcome of these investigations, so we will not comment further at this point.
We are continuing to invest in developing our in-house and external proprietary software to support us in identifying attempts to subvert the publication process and cases where publication has already occurred.
We are reassessing our processes for guest-edited issues to increase publisher oversight and provide more support to Editors in Chief in identifying problematic content, including the use of proprietary AI software.
We will work to support our Guest Editors in understanding and fulfilling their role in an appropriate and ethical way, by providing guidance on what is expected in these roles, how to confidently utilise our systems to assess submissions through robust peer review, and how we can and will support them if they have any ethical concerns regarding submissions to or management of their topical collection. We will also enhance our oversight of these collections to ensure that everyone can have confidence that our policies are being adhered to.
Should we find cases of deliberate attempts to compromise the publication process, we will collate all evidence, assess it legally and, where possible and appropriate, provide it to relevant institutions, other publishers and, potentially, relevant national authorities. Throughout our investigations, we will continue to liaise with COPE.
As we noted in August, this
makes the fifth time we’re aware of that a journal has been scammed by impersonators — a phenomenon that has earned its own category in our database of retractions — and doubtless just a handful of many other such scams that have yet to be discovered. What motivates the impersonators is unclear, although ensuring their friends and colleagues have papers accepted — and perhaps cite them — may play a role.
Elsevier also issued expressions of concern for about 400 articles earlier this year.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a one-time tax-deductible contribution or a monthly tax-deductible donation to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
“The publication process is inherently based on trust….”
While this statement may have been acceptable at some earlier time, the publishing industry now monetizes that trust without being a diligent *protector* of that trust. A more modern phrasing of the above could be:
“The publication process is inexplicably based on trust….”
How can this be true as so many Expressions of Concern were issued? The Research Integrity team at Springer Nature can’t be that dedicated and the ” in-house-developed detection tool” can’t be any good. Publishing is just a money making business. Scammers have been scammed!
“The dedicated Research Integrity team at Springer Nature is constantly searching for any irregularities in the publication process, supported by a range of tools, including an in-house-developed detection tool.”
Springer Nature sounds like some “bot”, which is censored by lawyers. This rings as hollow as the conclusions are not affected by the problematic data.
“Protecting the integrity of the scientific record sits at the heart of our company and a paper by paper investigation is underway for the four issues.”
Springer Nautre may not picking up on the fact governments in the U.S. , China and Germany are no longer so enamored with the “business model”, and may be about to rein in let-it-rip capitalism.
The likes of Elsevier and Springer Nature are the worst form of capitalism.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58579831
An “in-house-developed detection tool” Springer might consider could consist of having a human who is a knowledgeable scientist in the field screen the papers for appropriate content and then distribute them to other humans who are professionals in the field for their assessment of them. These humans are called “peers” and their assessments could be called “peer review.” It could be a new system!
A bad form of capitalism they undoubtedly are, it is arguable that prior to 2008 (Reed) Elsevier was an even worse form, when in addition to publishing, it also drew revenue from running international arms/weapons shows.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/may/30/armstrade.weaponstechnology
I’ll take yet another opportunity to advertise a brilliant blog post by Igor Pak, a mathematician from UCLA, on the topic of “special issues”.
Also, about Springer’s attitude.
https://igorpak.wordpress.com/2020/10/26/the-guest-publishing-scam/
Igor Pak’s post is spot on. Thanks for daylighting it here. And kudos for your contributions bringing this whole fascinating mess to light in the first place.
An interesting post; thanks for the reference.
What will be the consequences for the EiC and the editorial board that was involved in this scam?
It is impossible that the EiC Abdullah Al-Amri didn’t notice the many nonsense papers that were mass produced.
In addition to issues found in the texts published… Another tip relates to the editorial assessment timeline of the ‘Arabian Journal of Geosciences’ (it was also the case for ‘Microprocessors and Microsystems’). Publishers should monitor time-to-market at the journal level and *react* to improbable shrinking durations popping up. See https://twitter.com/gcabanac/status/1443139781999857665
I corresponded with Hoshang Kolivand, whose name was listed as the editor for the special collection “Smart agriculture and geo-informatics” with 23 articles, 20 of which were clearly bogus. When asked if he actually handled that special collection, he replied “No these papers were not handled with me. Then they will be withdrawn and retreated soon.” From this I infer that he probably did agree to serve as a guest editor as he clearly has had communication from the journal, but that the journal is recruiting legitimate academics as “names” to attract papers, but then the actual acceptance of submissions is handled by non-science staff at the publisher’s editorial office with no actual peer review. How else do hundreds of nonsense papers get published? No geoscientist read them. Springer is not being fully forthcoming.
The same Hoshang Kolivand who edited a Special Issue on “Computational human performance modelling for human-in-the-Loop machine systems” for J. Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, also full of garbage papers?
https://pubpeer.com/publications/B9B4F5EF8A283A4D44CBAECECE592A
It should be recognized that there is collateral damage to innocent bystanders in Springer’s indiscriminate behavior with this title. In the collection “Smart agriculture and geo-informatics” there are at least two papers that seem completely legitimate. The actually are on topic for the call for papers, by authors with institutional emails from real institutions in India, with actual analyses about optimizing irrigation and fertilizer distribution for crop yield using remote imaging and AI interpretations, with citations to actual papers that have titles that relate to the point made in the text. Yet these two papers got rounded up for expressions of concern same as the fake ones. It will remain to be seen if Springer retracts all with a broad brush or listens to individual protests.
The two apparently innocent bystanders were first, Ultra-reliable low latency communication technique for agriculture wireless sensor networks by Mahendran Sivananaintha Perumal and second, “SVM-based compliance discrepancies detection using remote sensing for organic farms” from TRP Engineering College, Tiruchi, India (an institution with a curious web presence, but it does at least appear to be an institution). I am too from the field to judge their quality but close enough to be be confident they are not gibberish papers written by AI.
1) If some authors are indeed innocent bystanders, I don’t think the situation for them is any different as the situation when someone submits a legitimate paper to a predatory journal. Should I elaborate more on that?
2) No matter what, if the peer-review was compromised for the entire issue, including “innocent” papers, these papers should be re-assessed from scratch.
3) Given the combination of geographic origin of these papers and their titles, I would say there’s a very decent chance that they are not innocent. I promise to check as soon I have enough time for it.
Nah, at least the second one contains this gem:
“Dihydrotestosterone (DHT) sensor is used in the proposed
system architecture that is capable of estimating both the temperature and humidity […]”
From what I can deduce, dihydrotestosterone has nothing to do with these sensors:
https://www.arduino.cc/reference/en/libraries/dht-sensor-library/
Good find. I just hope that Springer does check these individually to make sure that (potentially) innocent bystanders aren’t indiscriminately rounded up and booted. The call for papers to at least one of the topical sessions looked completely legitimate (link was in the comments to the original August RW post on this situation).
In the first paper flagged by Chris Mebane, a sentence reads:
“Agriculture needs automation in the field of agriculture.”
I have a hard time believing this to be a characteristic of a manuscript submitted in good faith.
I leave it as a collaborative exercise to identify the “tortured phrases” in the following paragraph on Page 3:
“The current 3GPP LTE utilizes a fitting booking to use multi-
users, adaptive modulation, and coding (AMC) as per channel quality data estimated at a recipient and hybrid automatic repeat and request (HARQ) for proficient retransmission to give high dependability just as high otherworldly productivity [Dahlman et al. 2011]. Nonetheless, such a methodology requires delays for
channel quality measure and criticism, booking, and retransmission that it gets improper for conveying delicate data, even though it is the most proficient approach to convey inactivity uncaring data. Though some variety schemes and quick HARQ plans for better dependability at a low latency are thought of, for example, in Channel (2016), Uplink (2017), and Yeo et al. (2017), their unwavering quality levels and the subsequent otherworldly efficiencies are a long way based on what is needed for viable URLLC administrations.”
Tom Bartlett in the Chronicle of Higher Education
https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-did-a-peer-reviewed-journal-publish-hundreds-of-nonsense-papers
“I also spoke to Abdullah Al-Amri, the founder and editor in chief of the journal, and a professor of geophysics at King Saud University, in Saudi Arabia. He assured me that he reads every paper that appears in the journal, which is remarkable considering that it publishes two issues each month. In September alone, the journal published 276 papers. At that clip, Al-Amri would be reading roughly 10 papers a day, every day, including weekends.” …
https://web.archive.org/web/20211030/https://bluesyemre.com/2021/09/29/the-mysterious-case-of-the-nonsense-papers-a-peer-reviewed-journal-published-hundreds-of-them-why/