After months of investigation that identified networks of reviewers and editors manipulating the peer review process, Hindawi plans to retract 511 papers across 16 journals, Retraction Watch has learned.
The retractions, which the publisher and its parent company, Wiley, will announce tomorrow in a blog post, will be issued in the next month, and more may come as its investigation continues. They are not yet making the list available.
Hindawi’s research integrity team found several signs of manipulated peer reviews for the affected papers, including reviews that contained duplicated text, a few individuals who did a lot of reviews, reviewers who turned in their reviews extremely quickly, and misuse of databases that publishers use to vet potential reviewers.
Richard Bennett, vice president of researcher and publishing services for Hindawi, told us that the publisher suspects “coordinated peer review rings” consisting of reviewers and editors working together to advance manuscripts through to publication. Some of the manuscripts appeared to come from paper mills, he said.
We asked what prompted the investigation. Bennett told us:
In April 2022, Hindawi’s Research Integrity team led an initial investigation into a single Special Issue (SI) after a Chief Editor raised concerns about some of the papers published in it. The team decided to investigate the content of the journal further. Through this investigation, the team highlighted a pattern of irregular and concerning reviewer activity and identified potential ‘bad actors’ that were present across many of these publications.
These concerns prompted the Publishing Insights and Research Integrity teams, enabled by recently enhanced analytic capabilities and newly developed dashboards providing views across all reviewer activity, to conduct a wider investigation to determine whether these same bad actors were involved in peer review manipulation elsewhere in the Hindawi portfolio.
Following the discovery that these bad actors were present in other journals, the Hindawi leadership team put in place a cross-functional working team combining the manual and data-driven investigation which resulted in the identification of further published articles.
In early August, Hindawi expanded the investigation under a combined investigation team comprising Research Integrity experts, data and analytics experts, publishing and operational teams, and legal counsel from both Wiley and Hindawi. This team evaluated in depth review activity across all potentially impacted articles and manuscripts. This resulted in a list of ‘compromised’ reviewers and editors in addition to the bad actors already discovered, identification of networks that exist between them, patterns of review activity, and insight into published articles and manuscripts at each stage in the review process that we could initially label as ‘compromised’. On September 6, the combined investigation team began assessing published articles which led to the initial recommendation to retract 511 articles that are compromised based on reviewer activity alone. We expect ongoing investigations to result in further retractions.
The publisher also held up the review and production of submitted manuscripts in which “potentially compromised” individuals were involved, and will begin assessing those articles.
We asked about what Hindawi will do to prevent something similar from happening again, but Bennett declined to share specifics, “as we believe it will simply open up new targets for those who seek to exploit a system based on trust.”
He did say that the publisher has banned the individuals its investigation identified, will contact research integrity officers or department heads as appropriate, and has shared its findings with industry groups:
It is increasingly apparent to all involved in safeguarding and investigating issues of research integrity that closing rings down at one publisher can simply move the problem to others. We are committed to taking an active role in preventing that.
Other publishers have announced large batches of retractions recently. IOP Publishing earlier this month said it planned to retract nearly 500 articles likely from paper mills, and PLOS in August announced it would retract over 100 papers from its flagship journal over manipulated peer review.
In a prepared statement, Liz Ferguson, Wiley senior vice president of research publishing for Wiley, said that attacks on research integrity such as paper mills, manipulated peer review, and image duplication and doctoring “are sophisticated and appear to be coordinated.”
Her statement continued:
As these attacks increase in frequency and intensity, we remain committed to upholding research integrity throughout our publishing programs. We have and will continue to share our findings with our peers and industry bodies to advance a cross-industry approach. This is absolutely essential to safeguard trust in research.
It’s something that we at Wiley are committed to and as a result we have taken the step of sharing our findings as transparently as possible, not just with our peers, but with industry associations, third party databases, and others.
These conversations have been very constructive. Our industry is one of trust – this remains our greatest asset. Only through concerted and collaborative action will we succeed together. This is our goal, and Wiley and Hindawi will continue to advance it tirelessly.
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Will the Hindawi refund the page fee charged?
No: “The submitting author assumes responsibility for the Article Processing Charge, and Hindawi will not issue refunds of any kind.”
See for example: https://www.hindawi.com/journals/js/apc/
Note that the same editor claims that APC is set “to ensure the quality checks, peer review, production and promotion of the article is carried out in a timely manner and to a high standard.”
Hindawi journals suddenly soared in publication since 2020, why is this problem only discovered now? Why wasn’t the integrity team organized until more papers were published? Shouldn’t Hindawi be responsible for this?
They are just responsible for making money.
Washington Post ran stories on Hindawi’s problems in 2015 & 2016. Plus in 2014 Naked Capitalism.com linked to a similar article on fraud in academic publishing. That was an article by Marjorie Lazoff in Health Care Renewal. https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/12/science-journal-fraud-paying-placement.html
What about Frontier journals?
Research has become a billion dollars business like Cancer, Diabetes and COVID-19 vaccines. The quality of research work has detouring rapidly. All publishers like SAGE, IEEE, ACM, T&F, Hindawi, Elsevier they are all others have become minting machines. In my opinion “Research publications must be free for all”.
I think this story showcases that, if they wish to do it, large publishers are in an excellent position to shut this kind of behavior down in their journals. This kind of coordinated operation would be very hard for individual data sleuths, without access to the reviewer databases, to do. Kudos to Hindawi and Wiley. Yes, they should have gotten on it sooner, but we can still applaud that they’re doing it at all (unlike many publishers including some of the biggest).
Over at PubPeer, the individual data sleuths are doing pretty well. There are various clues.
– Tortured phrases and the Problematic Paper Screener get a real work-out.
– Corresponding Author emails are useful (because the papermills tend to send in their work by acquiring single-use university-student accounts, rather than use the nominal authors’ actual institutions).
– Meaningless irrelevant citations that occur across multiple fake papers (the papermills are running a citation-stacking business on the side).
– Simultaneous submission dates.
Nick Wise was (afaik) first to comment on the bogus email addresses (in conjunction with bogus co-authors):
https://twitter.com/nickwizzo/status/1563087470350454789
People have been notifying Hindawi / Wiley for at least a month that they have a real problem with Special Issues that are just fake-paper stovepipes. But who knows? Maybe they noticed it themselves, independently.
https://twitter.com/SmutClyde/status/1562587514011283462
The question is, who is the stovepipe feeding and why. It’s simple: MSMedia, government programs, Big Tech, Fake Science, to support political aims. Simple as that. Such as Joe Biden, Fauci, and so on but not just demcrats — unconstitutional policy makers/politicians of whatever ilk
Why would /that/ be the question, and why would /that/ be the answer?
The pressure on researchers to publishpublishpublish, journals selecting for interesting papers that will make people want to buy issues over more thoroughly vetted but less eye-catching studies, and just natural human laziness and attention seeking make more sense than a secret, well-organized club of everyone you personally don’t like.
It’s simple: MSMedia, government programs, Big Tech, Fake Science, to support political aims. Simple as that. Such as Joe Biden, Fauci, and so on but not just demcrats
Imma guessing that you haven’t actually looked into any Hindawi journals.
Hindawi get paid off the article processing charges. That’s why
6 September 2022:
https://twitter.com/nickwizzo/status/1567099887707209729
“The @Hindawi S.I. ‘AI-Driven Wireless Energy Harvesting in Massive IoT for 5G and Beyond’ in Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing has 40 papers so far. 10 were submitted on the same day with near-identical email addresses from a uni that none of the authors attend.”
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fb9tnPOWQAAmqhI.png
They are the ones who promote such behaviors by constantly requesting articles for their obscure journals. I don’t see any reason to congratulate them! Things just became too obvious this time and they had to take action to prevent their stocks from collapsing…
Hindawi journals have published thousands of junk papers since the Wiley acquisition, so “511 retractions” will just be a start.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YL5rMrZoUcp3rn1mP7B_X9QE08VPGXehhK-dlkFN_Iw/edit?usp=sharing
What does this table mean? Will all papers in this table be retracted?
They are all problematical enough to earn comments in Pubpeer.
What does Pivot Table 2 mean? Are they all the special issues and editors with problems? Or does it only represent the special issue that has been published so far？
The pivot tables sum up the Special issues (and their editors) containing problematic papers that have turned up in Pubpeer so far.
Have all the articles in the table been published
Are these the papers that will be retracted??
Secondly, the problem Hindawi raised is mainly about peer-review process so how can they blame the authors and retract their papers..
Thirdly, when this retraction happened and will all 500 papers retracted at onse?
How can they blame the authors? The authors submitted fake papers! They all deserve retractions!
Fake papers????
Fake papers should be detected from the prescreening stage and not after publication. Peer review problem is the journal responsibility. Let them retract all the papers but return the APC that SHOULD cover the quality check stage.
The journal also said that not all editors/authors are responsible for the paper retraction. So, who is the responsible then for this??
It’s not from Hindawi. It’s a pubpeer document only questioning the said papers. Some with a few concerns with reference mistakes and some with topic content differences.
After this incident, I’m afraid there will be no more Chinese contributors!
It’s strange: HINDAWI never found out? Has HINDAWI collected a large wave of page fees and started harvesting to save its reputation?
They say they just discovered it this year, deceiving themselves and others.
This event is a sign: Chinese people will stay away from HINDAWI! The relevant Chinese institutions, should also issue warning messages about it.
HINDAWI is too far gone.
Where can we see a list of these papers that have been retracted?
I’ve never thought much of Hindawi or its journals. I still don’t read or cite Hindawi journals, but this story does raise my opinion of them a little. Investing these kinds of resources to clamp down on this behaviour is no small feat. Good on them. Now hopefully they can improve processes so they don’t publish hundreds and hundreds of junk papers, then they won’t have to retract them later.
Bravo. But probably too little, too late. Corruption in science and academia and MSM is so widespread, its hard to be optimistic. More than one of my professors at university suggested that in any intellectual sphere that most written was drivel. But, that to recognize what was truly worthwhile, one must be able to evaluate the dreck.
Since the number of publication and the quality of the journals in which they are published have a major impact on professors receiving tenor and promotion, I recommend that each publication should be evaluated on scale of a -10 to +10. A professor with no publications would have score of zero which conceivably could be higher than those with a number of publications. This hopefully would separate the wheat from the shaft reducing the effort needed to read worthless articles brought about by publish or perish.
Hindawi has the team of quality checking and initial paper screening. I wonder why there are so many retraction. Also, they get paid with APC. Suggestion goes to Hindawi for random selection of reviewers and guest editors, cross-selection of editors like MDPI does. Random selection of reviewers have been applied with MDPI.
I find this post interesting:
https://dethwench.com/wileys-predatory-behavior-with-scientific-authors/
I hope Elsevier will follow path and investigate the rings running special issues like these:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/science-of-the-total-environment/special-issue/10SCLWM85MD
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/energy/special-issue/102HKH27SRJ
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/energy/special-issue/10VMG1BH9HN
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/energy/special-issue/10G9XT96N9T
all by the same people and their friends with tens of papers for themselves in each issue.
They are all problematical enough to earn comments in Pubpeer.