The publisher Frontiers has begun retracting a batch of 122 articles across five journals after an investigation found a network of authors and editors engaged in “unethical actions” such as manipulating citations and reviewing papers without disclosing conflicts of interest.
The publisher’s research integrity team has identified more than 4,000 articles linked to the network in journals owned by seven other companies, according to a company statement. The team said it is willing to share details and the methodology of their investigation with other publishers upon request. The company is a member of the STM Hub, a platform publishers use to share such information.
As the publishing industry comes to grips with its paper mill problem, many firms have issued retractions in bulk. Frontiers retracted a batch of 40 in 2023, and a dozen the year before.
The latest tranche of retractions began to appear July 28. By our count, at least 25 were posted that day. According to one of the notices, which are identical for each paper, the publisher’s investigation “identified this article as one for which the integrity of the peer review process has been undermined, resulting in the loss of confidence in the article’s findings.”
The investigation “was not able to determine whether all authors, editors, or reviewers were aware of or involved in the misconduct, but this misconduct was significant enough to determine that the scientific integrity of the article cannot be guaranteed,” the notices state.
A list of the forthcoming retractions Frontiers provided us names one paper from Frontiers in Ecology in Evolution, six from Frontiers in Public Health, 29 from Frontiers in Energy Research, 33 from Frontiers in Environmental Science, and 53 from Frontiers in Psychology. Most were published in 2022.
The investigation began after a reader noted undisclosed conflicts of interest in the peer review of a single paper, according to the statement. PubPeer user “Desmococcus antarctica” has posted comments on some of the papers to be retracted, identifying instances in which an author and reviewer had previously coauthored a paper together.
After the first tip, the research integrity team began investigating all the authors’ previous submissions, publications, and coauthor networks, the publisher’s statement said.
“As the investigation proceeded, it became clear that a broad and sophisticated network of about 35 authors were potentially colluding over a very large number of journals and published papers, a fraction of which were published by Frontiers,” according to the statement.
Frontiers has an artificial intelligence review system for submitted manuscripts, which now includes verification of the reviewers’ and handling editors’ conflict of interest statements, the company said.
One of Desmococcus antarctica’s comments on PubPeer pertains to “Households’ Perception and Environmentally Friendly Technology Adoption: Implications for Energy Efficiency,” published in 2022 in Frontiers in Energy Research. The user pointed out that reviewer Muhammad Mohsin, an associate professor in the school of finance and economics at Jiangsu University in China, had previously coauthored a paper with one of the authors.
Mohsin also served as an editor for the collection in which the paper appeared. Many papers from the collection, which Frontiers calls a “Research Topic,” have been retracted, and Mohsin is listed as the handling editor on several. He did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
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Link to the statement from Frontiers: https://www.frontiersin.org/news/2025/07/29/frontiers-research-integrity-team-uncovers-peer-review-manipulation-network
Sometimes it seems like big publishers knowingly publish unethical papers. It feels as if they prefer to let these papers go online and then retract them in bulk later, rather than properly enforcing a rigorous peer-review process to prevent such papers from being published in the first place. They charge over $2,000 per paper—what exactly are the authors paying for? A polished PDF? Retractions are starting to look like a profitable business since hundreds of paying authors never get refunds. Even worse, the spread of false science can be dangerous for society. And you know what really frustrates me? Everyone in the scientific community is aware of this.
I would like to raise a few counter arguments:
1° I would prefer journals to accept rubbish/fake papers and then retract them. At least this way the authors will learn or will be documented to be part of fraudulent practices. If the journals stop the fraud (before publishing) the frauds will just learn, improve the paper and publish somewhere else (without people able to catch the fraud).
2° Not sure ‘what exactly are the authors paying for’ as argument means here. If you go gambling and lose your money, you lost it. If you pay to be an on a paper (knowingly it’s fake/not acceptable) and you lose the paper, too bad, you took a gamble. See also 1: I am glad these people lost their money, let it be a lesson to them.
3° Your statement ‘everyone’ in the scientific community is aware of this? I beg to differ! The majority is unaware/doesn’t care or keeps pushing the narrative that fraud in publications is a marginal event (<0.1 or <1%). It's not! It's a major problem and the majority of scientists still ignores or denies it.
Oh, wow… I didn’t realize how profitable this practice is! Be a decent gatekeeper and prevent unethical papers from publishing –> the publisher gets $0; publish those papers then retract them –> the publisher gets $2000+… then, yeah, there is no incentive at all for publishers to be good gatekeepers!
The thing is: if you prevent it, it will be published somewhere else! Unless authors are put on a blacklist you won’t stop it.
Nothing like a planted glowing review to ensure publication success, eh? We must remember that some authors, often women and minorities, obviously face discrimination in getting their articles published. Many also face governmental coercion to publish or perish, literally. Opposing these drastic incentives, recall that editors of “quality” medical journals often lack any intelligence at all, preferring “fairness” to competence and substituting unearned inclusivity for experienced competence. They insist upon reviewer recommendations from authors well known for their “big bang” social ineptitude, inviting this sort of “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” activity both coniving and innocent.
The answer is not more automation. Artificial intelligence (A.I.) will never allow paradigm shifts, breakthrough articles with new thinking reaching new conclusions with old data because prejudice is baked in and AI can only accept regurgitation of an inept status quo, at least presently. While thorough, A.I. is hopelessly inept.
It seems to me that there is no solution. Firing all the women and minorities at great publishing houses would take all the fun out of being an editor, since getting paid big salaries and loving it requires good-looking women in “obvious good health” along with Saudi and Quatari paper mill cash infusions.
Prejudice, incompetence, and group think are by no means recent phenomena. Medicine has been too big for its britches for quite some time now. Crawford W. Long, MD, will never receive proper credit for his invention of anesthesia so long as vast murals of deceit thrive among Long usurpers descendents at the New England Journal of Medicine, a journal of loathsome reputation that should have collapsed from shame already. A.I. may discover ancient bias to account for medicine’s lack of real progress for so many generations, perhaps discrediting some Nobel Prize winners along the way, but those, too, will be suspect until some smarter brains take over publishing.
One of the reasons for retractions in Frontiers in Psychology may be that background checks of the articles are not done rigorously inspite of AI use.