Hindawi and Wiley, its parent company, have identified approximately 1,200 articles with compromised peer review that the publishers will begin retracting this month.
Jay Flynn, executive vice president and general manager of the research division at Wiley, which acquired Hindawi in 2021, wrote about the forthcoming retractions in a blog post at Scholarly Kitchen yesterday.
The plan to retract 1,200 articles, which the publisher expects to take a few months, follows Hindawi’s announcement last September that it would retract 511 articles across 16 journals for manipulated peer review. (We’ve tracked 501 retractions from 23 Hindawi journals since the announcement.)
The new batch of articles was identified as a result of the work that led to those initial retractions, a Wiley spokesperson told us in a statement. The papers to be retracted are concentrated in the same journals as the earlier batch, the spokesperson said, and all from special issues.
“The Special Issues in these journals were targeted by papermills and bad actors, with researcher identities manipulated (to appear as legitimate researchers) and content fabricated (to appear as legitimate content),” the spokesperson said.
Other publishers have recently issued retractions en masse after identifying signs of paper mill activity. Last year, IOP Publishing retracted nearly 500 articles, and PLOS retracted more than 100 papers from its flagship journal over manipulated peer review.
From mid-October to mid-January, Wiley paused publication of Hindawi special issues, losing $9 million in revenue. Last month, the analytics company Clarivate, which assigns impact factors to journals, dropped 19 Hindawi journals from its Web of Science index for failing to meet quality criteria.
Flynn’s blog post also mentioned the publisher is “designing a new retraction process that will help us, and potentially others, accelerate and deal with this new era of mass retractions fairly.” The Wiley spokesperson declined to share further details on the new process.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution 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 team@retractionwatch.com.
“Designing a new retraction process” is just a waste of time. Hindawi is no longer credible as a publisher (as far as it ever was), and it would be more appropriate to provide a strategy avoiding the foreseeable manuscripts submission collapse. Hopefully, they will get through this.
I strongly agree with you. The retracted paper https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/380260, which I call “The T relevance” in my PhD scientific writing courses is incredibly and merits the removal of their editors and personal involved.
Essentially, Clarivate sets the bar for scientific journals. They will retract as many as needed to get their journals back to the index. Hindawi has a lot of toy journals to experiment with. With time, they will find their “new retraction” sweet spot for sure.
I want to review manuscripts.
Who cares
I think the fake publications make use of what is called blind review policy. I feel many times the blind review often looks as review by a blind. The review process must be transparent, open and available to public for commenting. Donot give any research item for review or comment to who donot want disclose his identity.
Open access journals and fake science are friends
Why? Why can’t fake science be friends with subscription journals? Fake science is infesting EVERY journal, open access or closed access!
I just read a Hindawi article that claims:
The soul-sorting-rainbow-teleporter device used by the ancient Greek god of fate was real and was a computer built by Ancient Greeks, planetary vibration [a.k.a. the Music of the Spheres?] is the real cause of climate change, the ancient Greeks had a network of ground stations to measure it, Earth is changing the Sun’s climate, and science is a conspiracy because a [fraudulent, climate denier] journal was shut down. All of that is just from the abstract, 1st sentence of the intro and 1st ref; after that it starts to get weird. Trees can time travel, as can the author, apparently.
How does one report such an article, and to whom do I report it, and will they even care?
Yes, they do listen most of the time. Please report it very accurately, providing proper evidence to show that the paper is not at all scientific nor deserving to be published in a scientific paper.
By the way, care to give a link to the paper?
You should also check if that paper is published in a Special Issue or not. Usually, it is the special issues’ rookie (if not problematic) Editors who do such stupid errors (either unintentionally or intentionally).
If you found that other articles published within that particular special issue are problematic as well, do report all of them.
Report those unscientific papers (along with proper evidence) to both of these (or any more email addresses you can find):
publication.ethics@hindawi.com, help@hindawi.com
They will forward your concern to the most relevant team.
I don’t see how you could publish a paper such as the one described “unintentionally”, unless that term covers “I am not performing my editorial duties.” The chief editor of a special issue is responsible for the papers they publish.
Many publishers have discovered that it is very lucrative to farm out special issues with no oversight and let them fill up with nonsense. But when you do so, you are necessarily going to damage your journal’s good name, and should not be surprised when people treat your journals as junk. Publishers cannot have it both ways. Either you are a serious publisher and impose standards on what you publish, or you are a predatory publisher and print anything that’s paid for. You can’t be a serious publisher half the time and a predatory publisher the other half, but that’s what these “special issue” arrangements are trying to do.
As you can see, I said they are rookies. They have published some 50, 60 papers, but that’s it. It is indeed VERY possible to publish such papers unintentionally and innocently, and it is nothing but this scenario: A paper is peer-reviewed by one or some stupid or lazy reviewer(s) who almost accept(s) it without even reading it. And the editor simply goes for the vote of the majority.
Now you may ask why should reviewers do so? Because each review counts in one’s CV. They get academic scores for their reviews. So it is those stupid, lazy, and predatory reviewers who accept a paper without even reading it.
Actually, this was one of the red flags for many of those 1700 articles that are now retracted by Hindawi.
This is how an Editor can unintentionally accept a stupid paper. Through predatory PEER REVIEW.
Still, I am fully aware that in many cases, the Guest Editor himself was predatory too.
I agree that bad special issues severely compromise the quality of the journal, and that’s what I told them: by allowing such special issues, they ultimately damage their journals. Note that they do have standards for peer review and for conducting special issues. But many times, these standards aren’t enough or simply are neglected by Reviewers or Guest Editors.
I don’t agree that “Either you are a serious publisher and impose standards on what you publish, or you are a predatory publisher and print anything that’s paid for. You can’t be a serious publisher half the time and a predatory publisher the other half, but that’s what these “special issue” arrangements are trying to do.”
It is not binary. There are many shades of gray in between.
And if a publisher doesn’t take money, it never counts as predatory. Hindawi fully waves its APCs (fees) for about 84 low-income countries and discounts half of its APCs for about 42 middle-income countries.
Besides that, as far as I know, Hindawi exerts quite serious standards. I have seen some strong standards in Hindawi journals that never ever existed even in Elsevier or Springer Nature.
For example, Hindawi flags articles with too many authors, and if the authors can’t convince the journal that all those too many authors did play a real role, the paper will simply be rejected even without getting to the Editor (let alone to peer review).
Or another point: If your paper gets rejected by one Hindawi journal, the next Hindawi journal would not even consider your paper, unless you can first convince them that the previous shortcomings raised by the previous journal are all fixed now. No other publisher does so. Not Elsevier, not Springer, etc.
Or if the email address of all authors is not identifiable (either with a previous publication that verifies that this email is valid or with an academic email), Hindawi will not allow a paper to get to the Editor. No other publisher checks the email addresses like Hindawi. Even Hindawi asks people to give letters from Department Heads or University Principals, confirming that this particular author is indeed a student of your university.
I have seen many good points in Hindawi. And I have seen many drawbacks too.
No. Your statement “And the editor simply goes for the vote of the majority.” is wrong. Very wrong. His/her role ALSO is to look the content, not merely count votes. All of your arguments is wrong -and dangerous-.
@Aldo Calzolari, you have not even read my comment. You have just read that single line.