Wiley has issued a mass correction at one of its journals after finding nearly 100 papers with undisclosed conflicts of interest related to submissions by board members and relationships between authors and journal editors.
An investigation found conflict of interest issues in 98 papers published from 2020 to 2025 in Geological Journal, although the issues may have gone on before then, sleuths suggest. Nearly a third of the papers shared a single co-author — an associate editor at the journal.
That editor’s contract was not renewed, we have learned.
According to the correction notice, issued in early May, the journal had not taken “measures to manage potential conflicts of interest between authors and editors” for 98 articles.
A spokesperson for Wiley told us their investigation “uncovered that editors of the journal, who were also authors publishing in the journal … had not disclosed their position as members of the Editorial Board at the submission stage.” The journal currently lists 29 associate editors.
Wiley’s research integrity team “independently re-evaluated” the peer review process and content of each article, the correction states. As a result of the investigation, the journal amended the conflict of interest statement on each of the 98 affected articles.
We asked Wiley about what precedent a correction, rather than retraction, might set for other researchers. The spokesperson said the role as a publisher is “to investigate the content of the papers in question and take the appropriate action for the situation.” They also noted the inquiry turned up “no evidence” results in the papers were compromised.
Of those papers, M. Santosh co-authored 32. The name may be familiar to Retraction Watch readers: Last year, Santosh was involved in an instance of “pal review” at a geology journal.
Santosh has listed affiliations in recent papers at Kochi University in Japan and China University of Geosciences in Beijing. He is also a “Highly Cited Researcher” with more than 1,600 published articles, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. His papers have been cited over 70,000 times, 12,000 of which are self-citations. Until the correction was published, he was also an associate editor at Geological Journal. According to the Wiley spokesperson, Santosh did not disclose his position as a member of the editorial board at the submission stage.
When we asked why Santosh was no longer listed on the editorial board, a spokesperson for Wiley told us the journal “did not renew the contract of an editorial board member who had repeatedly submitted manuscripts without COI statements identifying his role on the Editorial Board.”
Santosh said he was unable to comment as a “public university employee working in China.”
Geological Journal published the 98 papers between 2020 and 2025, which the Wiley spokesperson called a “realistic timeframe during which we can more reliably retrace what happened.” The spokesperson also noted that around that time, both the publisher and the “scholarly publishing industry more broadly speaking began strengthening policies” for editorial conflicts of interest.
However, several undisclosed conflicts of interest at the journal took place before 2020, as detailed in a PubPeer comment posted by “Desmococcus antarctica.”
Despite these apparent conflicts of interest, the spokesperson said the investigation “did not find any paper mill activity” associated with the articles and each paper underwent a “substantive” post-publication review by the research integrity team. The review included “manual review by our research integrity team of each article, reviewer report, and author response,” the Wiley spokesperson told us.
A sleuth who has asked to remain anonymous got in touch with us regarding this case. The sleuth said several of the papers to which the correction applied were “extreme” cases of conflicts of interest. These included papers where authorship relationships existed between the paper author, editor and reviewer, as detailed in another Desmococcus PubPeer comment.
In another example, Li Tang, who is Santosh’s former Ph.D. student, served as Santosh’s handling editor while coauthoring another paper in the journal within the same timeframe.
Guidance from the Committee on Publication Ethics on the topic states:
A published article might need to be corrected or retracted, depending on whether the editor considers the conflict of interest to have affected the peer review process or the article.
“We have additionally taken proactive steps to reinforce COI best practices with editorial teams,” the Wiley spokesperson said.
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