Sage has retracted 467 articles from the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems, a title it took on when it acquired IOS Press last November for an undisclosed sum.
The publisher “launched a thorough investigation” into the journal in April, according to a spokesperson, after the indexing company Clarivate “informed us about concerns relating to the quality of some of the journal’s content.”
“The investigation found that the peer review process for some articles was inadequate, leading to the retraction of these articles,” the spokesperson said.
The journal’s editor in chief, Reza Langari of Texas A&M University in College Station, resigned on June 16 “due to differences of opinion on how to proceed” with Sage’s investigation, he told Retraction Watch.
In Langari’s comments to us, he said submissions had grown significantly in recent years because of growth in the AI field, which the journal covers, reaching 10,000 last year. The journal implemented a prescreening process and rejected over 80% of submissions, he said, “some of which were clearly manufactured by paper mills or else using AI tools.”
Time pressure and lack of responses from reviewers sometimes shifted decisions about manuscripts to associate editors, Langari said. When he didn’t trust an editor, “I would summarily remove them.”
He speculates complaints from editors he removed or “disgruntled authors” he’d placed on an “internal blacklist” of nearly 1,000, or the large number of submissions to the journal, may have contributed to Clarivate flagging the journal.
Langari called Sage’s decision to retract over 450 articles “presumably due to short review periods or limited reviews,” a “rather drastic measure.”
“The decision to remove so many papers from my perspective may not have been entirely warranted,” Langari said. He was not involved in the final decision. “I do appreciate the fact that they did not unduly blame myself, the editorial board and the authors in their retraction notices,” he said.
Sage paused publication of new articles in the journal when it began investigating, and will continue the pause while moving the management of the journal in-house, according to the spokesperson.
The statement continued:
At Sage, we believe in the power of the academic record and the importance of taking corrective action, when necessary, as we work to hold all our journals to high quality standards.
The journal’s profile page on Clarivate’s website states indexing for the title in Web of Science is “on hold” while the company re-evaluates its content “according to our selection criteria.”
If Clarivate removes the journal from Web of Science, the company will no longer index its papers, count their citations, or give the title an impact factor, which makes it a less attractive venue for researchers to publish their work. Universities and other institutions use metrics about citations, as counted by indexes such as Web of Science, in hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, meaning researchers who previously published in the journal also may pay a price.
Clarivate did not give the journal an impact factor in 2020 over concerns about “citation stacking,” also known as participating in “citation cartels” or “citation rings.” In 2021, IOS Press retracted nearly 50 articles from the journal for citing “literature sources that have no relation to the subject matter of the citing article,” according to the notice. (Langari acknowledged this episode as one “mishap” in his 21-year tenure as editor in chief, which he said involved “special issues guest edited by presumably trustworthy individuals.” Afterwards, the journal focused on regular submissions and stopped producing special issues “unless done under our control.”)
Sage was aware of issues with the journal before acquiring IOS Press, the publisher’s spokesperson said:
For any new journal we take on, we use our resources to make sure we’re publishing at a high standard and in accordance with COPE. If there are any issues with specific journals then we’ll take corrective action as needed.
The retraction notice for the articles cites “inadequate” peer review, and states, “we have no evidence to suggest authors were involved.”
“The Publisher acknowledges the anonymous volunteers on PubPeer whose observations complemented our internal investigation,” the notice states.
PubPeer user “Rhipidura albiventris” commented on several of the now-retracted papers to point out flaws in the calculations and question the relevance of citations.
Even more papers have been flagged via the Problematic Paper Screener, a project of sleuth Guillaume Cabanac which uses various detectors to spot bad practices in academic papers.
According to Cabanac, the PPS has identified 11 articles in the journal with tortured phrases, nonstandard wording of common phrases that seem to be written by computers. None of these flagged papers appears in today’s retraction notice.
The PPS “Feet of Clay” detector, which identifies articles that cite retracted work, has flagged 674 papers in the journal, not all of which have been retracted in this batch.
Today’s retractions “will feed the Feet of Clay even more,” Cabanac told Retraction Watch, once the detector, which uses the Retraction Watch Database, now part of Crossref, receives information about them from the metadata providers. “We’ll need to assess the domino effect.”
“Chain retractions” may be necessary if authors referenced the now-retracted papers with the “‘citation plantation’ technique,” Cabanac said, referring to over-citation of particular authors, even for unrelated topics. “I’m curious to see which journals will be ‘contaminated’ the most…”
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There are close to 1600 papers flagged on PubPeer and/or retracted in Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems (see the Retractions, EoC, and CQC Notices tab on https://psiref.com/periodicals/12301119/journal-of-intelligent-and-fuzzy-systems). Rhipidura albiventris appears to have begun their journey into this hot mess as early as October 2019.
The reference lists for many of these papers certainly cite numerous retracted as well as PubPeer flagged papers. A quick glance of the reference lists sorted by publication date in reverse chronological order clearly shows the vastness of the paper mill(s) that have used this journal as a conduit.
It is pretty obvious by now to anyone examining these “products” that not only do paper mills promise their customers authorship but also citations to said product (see Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 2024 – VOLUME 172 , p 111397 DOI: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2024.111397 for a teaser). You can throw a dart at numerous papers published since 2019 by authors with an affiliation containing “China” and “Hospital” that has garnered 10-60+ citations within its first 2-3 years of publication and have a glance at the papers citing it as well as the most recent 2-5 papers published in its reference list. Spoiler alert: #omgwtf
While we all have lamented about paper mills for last several years, the suspected “citation side” of paper mills is actually a wonderful feature as it simplifies detection of potential milled candidates by simply viewing reference lists sorted by the referenced paper’s publication date in reverse chronological order as PSIref does for the metadata of all publication reference lists. The potential paper milled products light up like a Christmas tree in the references and simplify detection of potential / probable candidates for PubPeer. Sadly though, you quickly come to the realization that after several years of hard labor by the friendly neighborhood sleuths, we are just beginning to scratch the surface of the paper mills.
However, this way of viewing reference list metadata is going to become more and more relevant moving forward in this cat and mouse game as the generative AI from Large Language Models becomes better and better. If we can effectively make the citation vehicle side of paper mills excessively risky to their detection, a vital leg of their business model can be broken and leading to a reduction of noise in the citation networks.
Will Sage wrap up the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems for the circular filing cabinet as was Wiley’s solution for several Hindawi rags suffering from a similar affliction? Or will they attempt to “re-brand” like say Wiley’s new OA “Future Series” – aka the surviving Hindawi stable. Regardless, the damage is done, it’s lipstick on a pig.