Elsevier is retracting 500 papers from a journal dedicated to conference proceedings because “the peer-review process was confirmed to fall beneath the high standards expected,” Retraction Watch has learned.
As we reported a month ago, “data thug” James Heathers “found at least 1,500 off-topic papers, many with abstracts containing ‘tortured phrases’ that may have been written by translation or paraphrasing software, and a few with titles that had been previously advertised with author positions for sale online.”
Shortly thereafter, Elsevier told us they were beginning an investigation of the title, Materials Today: Proceedings. Yesterday, they said the retractions were beginning.
Here is a representative notice, for “Meta-heuristic approach to enhance the performance of web crawler for web page clustering and link priority evaluation”:
This article has been withdrawn as part of the withdrawal of the Proceedings of the International Conference on Emerging Trends in Materials Science, Technology and Engineering (ICMSTE2K21). Subsequent to acceptance of these Proceedings papers by the responsible Guest Editors, Dr S. Sakthivel, Dr S. Karthikeyan and Dr I. A. Palani, several serious concerns arose regarding the integrity and veracity of the conference organisation and peer-review process. After a thorough investigation, the peer-review process was confirmed to fall beneath the high standards expected by Materials Today: Proceedings.
The veracity of the conference also remains subject to serious doubt and therefore the entire Proceedings has been withdrawn in order to correct the scholarly record.
The tally is “about 500 papers at the moment” but the final figure is still unclear because the investigation is ongoing, an Elsevier spokesperson tells us. Other examples:
- Design and development of IoT based home computerization using Raspberry pi
- Smart parking guidance system using RASPBERRY-PI
- Energy recovery from sewage sludge using microbial fuel cell
Conference proceedings and guest-edited issues seem to be particularly vulnerable to paper mills. To name just a few recent cases, IOP Publishing has retracted 850 papers that fall into that category, and the Association for Computing Machinery has retracted more than 300.
Update, 0400 UTC, 11/4/22: We have learned that Elsevier had begun investigating papers in Materials Today: Proceedings in 2021. On August 20 of that year, in response to an email from sleuth Alexander Magazinov on behalf of himself and others, Elsevier’s Catriona Fennell wrote:
In confidence, we also have an active investigation of several conferences/proceedings published in Materials Today Proceedings, where we have evidence that the peer review process was faked. We suspect some conferences may have never taken place (even virtually) and we are currently gathering evidence to support that suspicions. We have not started manual checking the content of papers yet on an individual article level.
If you have the capability to automatically check large numbers of papers for suspicious language patterns, that would be incredibly helpful for this investigation.
Going forward, we are planning major changes to the structure and editorial process for this journal to avoid over-reliance on the integrity of conference organisers. While the journal has been following detailed process for validating conferences and conferences organisers or several years, unfortunately it becomes increasingly challenging to detect fake conferences in advance. For example, conference organizers regularly wholesale copy the content of legitimate conference websites, to create the appearance of a legitimate conference.
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“The tally is “about 500 papers at the moment” but the final figure is still unclear because the investigation is ongoing, an Elsevier spokesperson tells us.”
“Conference proceedings and guest-edited issues seem to be particularly vulnerable to paper mills. To name just a few recent cases, IOP Publishing has retracted 850 papers that fall into that category, and the Association for Computing Machinery has retracted more than 300.”
Publishers never seem to learn their lessons over these kinds of journal issues they keep on making the same mistakes over and over again and then have to announce these huge batches of retractions. You’d think after a while they’d just stop doing them and save themselves the embarrassment. But I guess the money is too good when publishing “conference proceedings” and “guest-edited issues” for them to stop.
My records show that some kind of investigation into MatToday:Proc had been opened before 2021-08-20. Were they communicating with Heathers through a time machine?
I can guess they made themselves such mistakes.
At the end of the day, this is all pretty harmless. No competent scientist ever took those papers seriously. On the other hand there are classic papers published in journals such as Nature where the refereeing process should raise , to put it mildly, serious concerns. For a documented example you may have a look here: https://weirdtech.com/sci/expe.html
The journal review processes should improve as fast enough as other paraphrasing system to catch those shoddy papers. The conference organizers should not go for quantity but rather quality. This will avoid double work and embarassment.
If the editorial office of Elsevier had done the highly needed oversight all these won’t have happened.
It is disgusting for an highly rated publisher to found themselves in such a mess. And I want to believe Elsevier scopis index these trash too
FWIW the depublications are listed as “Withdrawals” within Elsevier’s taxonomy, rather than as “Retractions”.
Anyone else a little surprised to see a communication that begins with the words, “In confidence….” published so that all can see it? I guess that should just remind us that none of our messages are “in confidence….”
Wrong.
The message is: don’t abuse confidentiality. Elsevier tried to present themselves as rapid investigators, then they were called out on a lie. Simple as that.
I certainly agree with the “don’t abuse confidentiality” message. 🙂 Elsevier did not follow rapidly investigate the problems. Nor do most journals and publishers. 🙁 That does not, however, mean that my response was “wrong.” 🙂 I think that you mean there is another way to interpret my message. 🙂 I have served as a journal editor for almost 35 yrs at this point, and I think that I would be careful about sharing something from my publisher (who is not Elsevier) that began with “In confidence….” I have, however, seen my publisher take forever to investigate a case of plagiarism. That case was discovered during the peer review process, however, and the piece was never published. Thus, retraction was not necessary
Agreed, RW – should you be quoting this?? Did you get permission to use this statement from the sender?
Likewise — I thought it was surprising to see a quote starting with “In confidence…”
And let me just list the names who were raising concerns about MatToday:Proceedings since July 2022.
There were PubPeer posters who posted under their own names: Elisabeth Bik, Sylvain Bernes, Francois-Xavier Coudert, Daniel Markett, Nick Wise, Guillaume Cabanac.
There were many anonymous PubPeer posters (including Smut Clyde).
There were people who expressed concerns by other means, for instance, Cyril Labbe.
If Elsevier wants to pretend that none of those people exist or have ever existed – ok, good to know. Not very nice of them.
Elsevier should also investigate the following journals:
Science of the Total Environment
Energy
International Journal of Hydrogen Energy
For publishing numerous special issues from fake conferences organized by members of their own editorial boards. Some editors publish more than 6 articles for themselves or their friends in the same special issue.
Elsevier: see this special issue and count how many articles are authored by the editors or members from their institutes.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/energy/special-issue/10G9XT96N9T
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/energy/special-issue/10VMG1BH9HN
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/energy/special-issue/102HKH27SRJ
Can Elsevier investigate this special issue:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/science-of-the-total-environment/special-issue/10SCLWM85MD
and count how many articles are co-authored by the guest editors or others from their institution.
A perfect example of fake special issues designed to publish papers for its editors and their friends:
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/special_issues/energy_waste
So far, only 2 papers in the special issue both authored by the guest editor!