Clarivate, the company that assigns journals Impact Factors, this year will not give four journals updated versions of the controversial metric used by many institutions and publications as a shorthand for quality.
The journals will remain indexed in Web of Science, but won’t have an Impact Factor for this year in Clarivate’s 2023 Journal Citation Reports.
According to Clarivate, Marketing Theory, a SAGE title, has been suppressed for self-citation. Three other journals have been suppressed for citation stacking, sometimes referred to as “citation cartels” or “citation rings.” The other journals are as follows:
- Genetika (the Serbian Genetics Society)
- Bioscience Research (Innovative Scientific Information & Services Network)
- Bioinspired, Biomimetic, and Nanobiomaterials (ICE Publishing)
Jelena Milasin, president of the Serbian Genetics Society, told Retraction Watch that Clarivate’s decision not to give Genetika an Impact Factor this year was “truly devastating.” Milasin also disputed that the journal had participated in a citation stacking scheme:
We tried to explain to the Clarivate staff that we were absolutely unaware of the situation with the citations and that Genetika did not have any kind of relationship with the journal Bioscience Research nor with authors of cited and citing papers (we never heard of that journal). We neither had any influence on the editorial policy of the Bioscience Research journal nor the authors’ decision which papers to cite. Also, none of the papers published in Genetika in 2021 and 2022 cited any article from Bioscience Research.
So, basically, it seems to me quite unfair to be punished for something that was beyond our control.
Milasin said that the suppression decision came in spite of the editors of Genetika offering to retract 32 “suspicious papers” published in 2021 and 2022, to blacklist authors who “misused the papers published in Genetika by citing them unjustifiably,” as well as the authors of the cited papers, and to no longer ask scientists identified as engaging in peer review misconduct to review for the journal.
The listing for Genetika in Clarivate’s Master Journal List indicates that the publication is “On Hold,” meaning that “concerns have been raised about the quality of the content,” and Clarivate is reevaluating whether the title meets its selection criteria for inclusion in Web of Science.
The editors and publishers of the other suppressed journals have not yet responded to our requests for comment.
Last year, Clarivate suppressed three journals for self-citation. In 2021, it suppressed 10, and 33 the year before.
When Clarivate refreshed its Master Journal List in March, the company delisted 50 journals for failing to meet quality criteria, including 19 from the open-access publisher Hindawi. Delisted journals are no longer included on the Master Journal List or indexed in Web of Science, and Clarivate does not count their citations or assign them Impact Factors. All these changes can have negative effects for authors, because universities often use the metrics to judge researchers’ work for decisions about tenure and promotions.
Wiley, which acquired Hindawi in 2021, later announced that it would close four of the journals that had been delisted, as well as retract approximately 1,200 articles for compromised peer review. The company paused publication of Hindawi special issues for three months ending in mid-January, and lost $9 million in revenue as a result.
After we published a list of 82 journals Clarivate delisted in March, which also included those removed for production-related rather than editorial reasons, the company announced that it would publish the changes it makes to the Master Journal List each month, which it had not done before. No journals have been delisted this month.
This year’s Journal Citation Report includes 9,136 titles that have an Impact Factor for the first time, following Clarivate’s decision to expand the metric to journals in its Arts and Humanities Citation Index and Emerging Sources Citation Index. The company also is now publishing Impact Factors to one decimal place, rather than three. The move “introduces more ties, which will encourage users to consider additional indicators and descriptive data when comparing journals,” the company said in a press release.
Update, 7/28/23, 1430 UTC: Andreas Chatzidakis, one of the editors in chief of Marketing Theory, said that the journal was in the process of appealing the decision.
Update, 7/29/23, 1740 UTC: After publication, Clarivate informed us that their earlier statement that no journals had been delisted this month was not accurate, though none had been delisted with the release of the Journal Citation Reports. Clarivate delisted the Russian Law Journal, which we had reported had been hijacked,for editorial reasons when it refreshed the Master Journal List earlier this month.
Update, 7/7/23, 1915 UTC: After publication, ICE Publishing journals manager Ben Ramster informed us that the publisher had appealed Clarivate’s decision, “explaining that this was an isolated case involving a single paper in the journal” that had been cited by two de-listed journals. The appeal to Clarivate was not upheld.
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Many other ESCI journals that are to receive Impact Factors this year are terrible journals. Not necessarily unethical or plagiarizing. But I know journals that don’t even do the very basics of a proper journal, let alone a journal with an impact factor. I contacted Clarivate and criticized their recent decision of handing Impact Factors to ESCI journals.
Gotta agree with this.
Clarivate doesn’t actually care about the quality of journals. They only care about journals that bring them bad publicity.
I would like to quickly respond on behalf of Clarivate on two points here:
1. We do not suppress journals as a ‘punishment.’ We have always been clear that we do not assume or assign motive when investigating citation distortion, because we believe that regardless of reason, these distortions create an inaccurate reflection of the connections between articles. To a journal editor who is ‘devasted’ to lose the JIF, we say this – no assessment of a journal’s value or importance should ever rely on just one metric. Suppressed journals stay listed on the Master Journal List, their content remains indexed in the Web of Science, and previous years’ data can still be viewed in the JCR. This prior Retraction Watch post explains our position clearly: https://retractionwatch.com/2020/07/28/the-positive-case-for-suppression-a-guest-post-from-the-editor-in-chief-of-clarivates-web-of-science/
2. There are no outstanding appeals waiting to be heard.
Journals identified as possible suppressions were contacted in early May and provided with our evidence, which included a data set of activity. Each was given an opportunity to lodge an appeal; all appeals lodged have been heard and journals informed of decisions in May.
The delisting threshold is as laughable as it is.
All 4 delisted journals are no-name from no-name publishers. Beall would call them predatory without hesitation, but he’s retired now.
Genetika is famous for hosting a big bunch of “Iranian Plant Papermill” papers, read about that in Elisabeth Bik’s blog. There was another journal, an Italian one, affected to nearly the same degree. I don’t know about its fate.
That other journal was Caryologia (ISSN / eISSN: 0008-7114 / 2165-5391). It is currently “On hold” regarding WoS listing.
I am the editor in chief of Caryologia (property of the University of Florence) and I would like to know exactly what would be the fault of the journal. I noticed an unexpected increase in the impact factor due to a high number of citations by two articles with Iranian authors. I was surprised and we already posed under check some authors who had submitted an unusually high number of articles to the journal. However, all the articles passed through peer review and, moreover, Caryologia does not ask for APC to Iranian authors due to financial problems with payments (that may be a reason for the high number of submissions). By the way, only a small part of the publication costs of Caryologia are paid by APC (which are currently about 150 euros). Are You really suggesting that we should treat Iranian authors differently only on the base of nationality? Or russian authors for political reasons (someone asked us to do so)? Or Syrians? Or what else? I think we should define the meaning of predatory more exaclty
Dr. Pappini,
The fault of your journal is twofold: first, your journal’s “peer review” failed to catch obvious flaws; second, your journal failed to retract papers with obvious flaws.
Please, refer to the following three examples (out of 17 in your journal, listed by dr. Bik):
https://pubpeer.com/publications/2F50533FCA7D02BD13A64E038C3D09
https://pubpeer.com/publications/F7801DC65C6D580C5D5C275D1A6F7A
https://pubpeer.com/publications/8963C8392E29CAE90EDF9C065BE098
For the rest, check dr. Bik’s post and the spreadsheet referenced therein:
https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2022/09/15/the-iranian-plants-paper-mill/
What your journal should have done and failed to do (providing a peer review process of decent quality) has nothing to do with authors’ nationalities.
On the other hand, the authors’ nationalities are very relevant to the consequences of your failure, as your journal facilitated the flow of papermill cash to Iran, predominantly from China.
Please take a look at the definition of the paper mills reported by Anna Abalkina: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.13322
The paper mills are easily mistaken with the common research misconducts, e.g., figure duplication and data manipulation. Even the ethics experts may not distinguish the differences.
Firstly, i consider it very important to verify the correctness of published articles in general, and pubpeer and retraction watch are important under this point of view.
However, (by the way it’s Papini, not Pappini), i don’t think the faults were so obvious in this case. I don’t know if You are aware of the peer review process, however, to see that the latitude and longitude values are wrong is not so easy, even if a number higher than 59 is obviously wrong. Normally, it is a type of data relevant for people dealing with lists of plants/animals and their exact locations. The articles were provided together with a map, which is obviously the best way to visualize the provenance of samples. Even the fact that more papers use the same latitude/longitude does not prove anything, since it is a very common activity by scientists, during an expedition, to collect many samples from the same locations.
That means that, on the basis of the mistakes that You indicated there is only reason to produce a correction document indicating the correct long/lat. About the question of the paper mill: the quality of the article is the responsibility of the authors and the journals, but the misbehavior (or worse) with the citations is the responsibility of the authors. Also because the effect of a citation policy misconduct can be observed only after years.
Finally, first You deny, then confirm, at the end of Your post, that we should treat differently authors from Iran and China with respect to others. I think this is a very slippery path. My opinion is that every author should be considered responsible as an individual. Until I will be the editor of Caryologia I will continue this way.
About Bik’s list, one of the authors is Masoud Sheidai, who is a very renown Iranian botanist, who surely does not need strange games for career purposes.
My point is: You cannot throw away the baby together with the bathwater
Dr. Papini,
Your editorial (10.36253/caryologia-1848) seems to indicate that you were aware of “quality” issues. What motivated you to publish that text if it wasn’t the awareness of less-than-substandard manuscripts?
You write in your editorial “in some cases
even contain some parts of the text (partially) copied
from somewhere else, figures already used in other articles, and even wrong (?) figures.” and
“in many cases of these misconducts, the reviewers (and the editors) have large difficulties intervening.”
What’s the difficulty to simply reject such papers? No journal is required to accept manuscripts that are severely flawed and have copyright issues.
Many people on pubpeer provided profound evidence of fraud in many papers published in Caryologia. The pattern of the paper mill papers is clear, and it would have been easy to notify your editors to learn about the commonalities. This has nothing to do with nationalities. It is not too complicated to quickly check the cited papers for plausibility. It does not require any higher degree to start wondering about the connection of cited papers on “Fresnel solar reflector”, “PV/FC HRES using amended Water Strider Algorithm” in a paper on the population structure of a flowering plant. Don’t the editors even read the manuscript before sending them to peer review?
You say that these papers passed peer-review. You were made aware of severe fraud in many papers in Caryologia, and I wonder if the identity of the peer-reviewers has ever been checked. Even if you accept that editors don’t seem to read the manuscripts they send to reviewers (which they should), after learning about the fraud, one should expect more vigilence from scientists.
As it looks like, these shenanigans with fraudulent papers continue. In the latest issue of Caryologia, another paper with nonsense citations has been published: 10.36253/
caryologia-1629. Nothing learned as it seems!
Of course, if during the check something is found the articles are rejected.
My editorial was not referred only to Caryologia. However, the reference was about three specific cases: one with image manipulations (some years ago); one with self-plagiarism and one case of double submission.
About the article that You are indicating, there are a couple of citations of journals that do not appear strictly related to botany.
Guo, H., Wei Gu, Majid Khayatnezhad, Noradin Ghadi-mi, 2022. Parameter extraction of the SOFC mathematical model based on fractional order version of dragonfly algorithm. International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, 47(57):24059-24068.
I suppose the reviewers will have meant they were related to methodology.
By the way, I check all reviewers one by one by controlling if they have previous publications in the field. There might be some fake identity I suppose?
Of course, another problem is to find reviewers willing to review the articles in depth or willing to review at all. But this is a very general problem for all scientific journals.
Dr. Papini,
first of all, let me express my happiness that you are discussing the issue here.
> Of course, if during the check something is found the articles are rejected.
Some of the manipulations are so apparent that it is a surprise that they haven’t been found, by either editors or reviewers. I cannot imagine that this hasn’t been spotted by anyone yet if they would have read the manuscripts. I have seen the “in press” versions of several of those papers, and I am flabbergasted that they were considered as publishable.
If you (or the subject editors) were aware of low quality manuscripts, it is especially important to check the soundness of the manuscript and the reviews.
> About the article that You are indicating, there are a couple of citations of journals that do not appear strictly related to botany.
Guo, H., Wei Gu, Majid Khayatnezhad, Noradin Ghadi-mi, 2022. Parameter extraction of the SOFC mathematical model based on fractional order version of dragonfly algorithm. International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, 47(57):24059-24068.
I suppose the reviewers will have meant they were related to methodology.
In what way could the sentence “It is significant to infer patterns and mechanisms of speciation and hybridization, the evolutionary process by which new biological species arise and gene flow between closely related phylogenetic species can occur” require the citation of Guo et al., or Duan et al.? It would at least arouse my curiosity to check these references.
> By the way, I check all reviewers one by one by controlling if they have previous publications in the field. There might be some fake identity I suppose?
Of course, another problem is to find reviewers willing to review the articles in depth or willing to review at all. But this is a very general problem for all scientific journals.
Have the reviewers been suggested, or were they chosen by an editor? That’s the interesting question. When they have been suggested, then fake reviews are quite certain.
As editor in 2 journals myself, I’m aware of the problem of recruiting reviewers. However, it does not explain the accumulation of apparently fraudulent manuscripts in Caryologia. Editors should read the manuscripts in the first place and check if the reviews are at least sufficient. Otherwise, the work is left with the editors (I know, it’s not gratifying). I’m surprised that the publication of such terrible manuscripts with the exact same issues goes on for 11 months after reports on pubpeer. And I’m also surprised that the overwhelming evidence of such fraud hasn’t lead to any reaction yet. The evidence of copyright issues (this is actually a legal issue for the publisher!) and plagiarism is apparent. It has all been sufficiently shown on pubpeer. I am not talking about an individual reference that seems ill-fitted or a duplicated panel in a figure, which certainly can happen. I am talking about completely fabricated figures, copy & paste of tables from other manuscripts and reoccurring completely irrelevant references (even from manuscripts within the same issue of Caryologia!). It has all been shown at great length.
Genetic relationships between populations of Aegilops tauschii Coss. (Poaceae) using SCoT molecular markers
Caryologia, 75(1), 141-153 – July 2022
https://doi.org/10.36253/caryologia-1444
Haiou Xia – School of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Chongqing Metropolitan College of Science and Technology, Yongchuan, Chongqing, 402167
Tianyu Cheng – China Shipbuilding NDRI Engineering Co., Ltd Chongqing Branch, Yubei, Chongqing, 401120
Xin Ma – China Shipbuilding NDRI Engineering Co., Ltd Chongqing Branch, Yubei, Chongqing, 401120
Dr. Papini, do you want us to believe that three Chinese engineers, with background in shibuilding, suddenly decided to travel to Iran (at the height of COVID!) to explore the genetic diversity of Tausch’s goatgrass? Arguably, this is too far beyond science into the territory of fairy tales!
I am afraid that the “smaller” university journals such as Caryologia were not prepared to the methods used by these “authors”. I am afraid it is really something well studied.
The investigations are formally correct and are very similar one to the other because they use often the same methods. Under this point of view it is very difficult to find evident faults. However, the citations can be easily checked.
On the basis of Norbert Holstein’s observations, I am rechecking all current submissions and I found other cases containing absurd citations.
I am rejecting all of them and unfortunately, the authors’ names are not always the same as already shown here.
At least now i am able to intercept these types of misbehaviors.
I must admit: i was caught unprepared
Alessio Papini, Editor Caryologia
The “Papermill” is not used in a correct context and meaning. Just because a certain nation is attracted to a journal calling it papermill might not be fare.
I thought it wasn’t hard to locate and read dr. Bik’s post. Let me anyway leave the link below. Hopefully, there is enough context to justify the “papermill” term.
https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2022/09/15/the-iranian-plants-paper-mill/
Dr. Bik describes it quite well. Papermills are companies to “sell fake or plagiarized scientific papers”. Again a shorter definition given by Nick Wise:
https://undark.org/2023/06/21/in-a-tipsters-note-a-view-of-science-publishings-achilles-heel/
Yet, I observe that this definition wont come to consideration and still active researchers are mistaken with papermills. There must be a scientific method to distinguish papermills. If an article is not original it wont receive impact and citations from the community. Can it be considered as an indication?
Until a scientific method is not given, cherry picking and name calling might not be a good choice. Still the definitions are superficial. Considering papermills, no motives are discussed and no one knows how to prevent it in the long term. Currently methods for distinguishing active scientists and papermills not given. A scientific and in-depth study yet to study this issue.
Dr. Bik here:
https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2022/09/15/the-iranian-plants-paper-mill/
states that an article can be possibly papermill, if it is fake or plagiarized. Without satisfying this essential condition using the term “papermill” would be out of context.
A bit down the same post, there is a link to a Google spreadsheet listing 70 suspected papers, of which 31 are in Genetika and 17 are in Caryologia. All are supplied with PubPeer links, following which one can assess the suspected flaws.
The readers are welcome to judge whether this corpus is consistent with papermill activity.
Pubpeer is a post peer-review platform. The comments are not the indication of paper mills, even if you suspect a figure or push theories. Paper mills have definition. Data are biased.
I want to get information about latest update (2022) of impact factor for FOOD SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Publisher name: SOC BRASILEIRA CIENCIA TECNOLOGIA ALIMENTOS.
There is no update since 2021 for this journal, which make me curious about the future of this journal, as my PhD degree depends upon the SCIE nature of this journal. Please Help me in this regard.