One journal’s trash is another’s treasure – until a former peer reviewer stumbles across it and sounds an alarm.
In April, communications professor Jacqueline Ewart got a Google Scholar notification about a paper published in the World of Media she had reviewed, and recommended rejecting, for another journal several months earlier.
At the time, she recommended against publishing the article, “Monitoring the development of community radio: A comprehensive bibliometric analysis,” in the Journal of Radio and Audio Media, or JRAM, because she had concerns the article was written by AI. She also noticed several references, including one she supposedly wrote, were fake.
While authors often seek to publish rejected articles elsewhere, Ewart, of Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, said she was shocked because the version that appeared in the World of Media was nearly identical to the manuscript she had seen. The authors changed one word in the title, swapping “progression” for “development.”
In an April 7 email seen by Retraction Watch, Ewart raised concerns about the paper to Anna Gladkova, the editor in chief of World of Media, which is published by the journalism faculty at Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia.
Ewart emphasized the authors were informed of why their submission was rejected at JRAM, and they still had not made the changes in the published version. The next day, Alexandra Bondarenko, an editorial assistant, responded saying the journal had “every reason to undertake an investigation and re-check the mentioned article” and said the text “is being reprocessed by the anti-plagiarism system.”
On May 2, Ewart followed up and noted the paper was still available online. After that, the journal removed the article and added a note on the website: “The article has been taken off-line, as it is currently the subject of an internal inquiry. A decision will be communicated later.”
Amit Verma, an author on the paper and a professor at Manipal University Jaipur in India, said the authors “intended to revise and improve the paper based on the feedback from the World of Media review team,” but the changes amounted to one word in the title. However, he also admitted the “title change alone was insufficient in this instance, but we did it because progression was not suitable for the journey of community radio from 2000 to 2024, so I wrote the word ‘development.’”
Verma also told us the researchers used AI tools “to assist with certain aspects of the manuscript, such as grammar and style only. We used standard bibliometric tools for data collection and management, as well as basic proofreading tools.”
As for the incorrect references Ewart flagged, Verma said the researchers used sources “obtained from Indian institutional repositories, such as Shodhganga, and Google Scholar, where indexing and persistent availability can vary over time.”
This explanation doesn’t seem to address a citation to an apparent 2017 article attributed to Ewart, “The impact of digital convergence on community radio engagement,” purportedly published in the Media Studies Journal. The journal’s website lists no paper with that title, and Ewart told editors in her peer review that she has not published anything about community radio since 2012.
Verma emphasized the incorrect citations were “a matter of source stability and perhaps an over-reliance on less formal databases.”
He told us World of Media has allowed the authors to submit a revised version of the manuscript for publication. The journal did not respond to our request for comment.
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When I was an undergraduate researcher on my very first project, I got a stern talking-to by the lab head which amounted to “Never cite something you have not read.”
These folks need a similar talking-to. Evidently they did not read this article, since it *does not exist*: they had no business citing it.