Sage has retracted 416 articles from the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems (JIFS), which had a mass retraction of over 450 papers last August.
Before the mass retraction last year, which we covered, Sage paused publication of new articles from the journal, which it acquired when it bought IOS Press in 2023. The journal is now accepting new submissions, according to a Sage spokesperson.
The retraction notice mentions citation and referencing “anomalies,” “incoherent, extraneous text and tortured phrases” and “unverifiable authors and reviewers,” among other signs of misconduct. “These indicators raise concerns about the authenticity of the research and the peer review process underlying the following articles. The Publisher regrets that these were not flagged during the journal’s editorial and peer review processes,” the notice reads.
Most of the researchers are from universities in India and China.
The notice also credits the Problematic Paper Screener’s (PPS) “Feet of Clay,” a detector which flags articles citing retracted material. The detector makes use of the Retraction Watch database, which is now part of Crossref. Guillaume Cabanac, the sleuth who created the PPS, told Retraction Watch in August the retractions “will feed the Feet of Clay even more” as information is collected by metadata providers.
At that time, Feet of Clay had flagged 674 papers by JIFS, not all of which had been retracted. The number is now up to 716.
Due to suspicion of “citation stacking,” Clarivate did not give the journal an impact factor in 2020. And in 2021, IOS Press retracted nearly 50 articles from JIFS for “literature sources that have no relation to the subject matter of the citing article,” according to the notice.
The editor in chief of the journal, Reza Langari of Texas A&M University in College Station, resigned last June. He told us at the time his decision was “due to differences of opinion on how to proceed.” He told us growth in the AI field, which the journal covers, meant they received over 10,000 submissions in 2023 and rejected over 80% of them, “some of which were clearly manufactured by paper mills or else using AI tools.”
Sage was aware of issues with the journal before acquiring IOS Press, the publisher’s spokesperson said in August:
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.
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