AI research journal with sham board, metrics holds researcher’s paper hostage

A journal purporting to be “cited by esteemed scholars and scientists all around the world” claims a false impact factor and attempts to charge authors a fee for withdrawing articles, Retraction Watch has learned. And the editor in chief publicly disavows any relationship with the title on his website.

The International Journal of Swarm Intelligence and Evolutionary Computation, or IJSIEC, claims to publish research on robotics, AI, “bacterial forging [sic],” bioinformatics and computing, among other topics. 

A Retraction Watch reader brought the journal to our attention earlier this month. The researcher had submitted a paper to the journal but then noticed some red flags. Among them: One of the two listed editors-in-chief, Qiangfu Zhao, states on his website, “some journals are using my name to attract academic papers. I have no relation with these journals.” Zhao, a professor at the University of Aizu in Aizuwakamatsu, Japan, confirmed to us he has “no relation with this journal.”

When the author asked the journal to withdraw his manuscript during the review process, the journal said the researcher would have to pay €1219, the equivalent of around $1,400, within a week, according to an email we have seen. The researcher, who has asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the publisher, refused, at which point the journal published the paper — and then retracted it.

IJSIEC is one of 77 journals published by Walsh Medical Media, a “global leader” in open access publishing, according to the company’s website. Although it bills itself as a “healthcare publishing company dedicated to providing physicians” with research “directly relevant to patient care,” its journals have specialties such as chemical engineering, coastal zone management, and intellectual property rights. 

Neither IJSIEC nor Walsh Medical Media responded to our multiple requests for comment to two listed emails associated with the journal and publisher, WhatsApp and the online communication form.  

The journal lists its impact factor as 1.61, despite not being indexed in Clarivate, the company responsible for assigning that metric. None of Walsh Medical Media’s journals are covered by Scopus, although IJSIEC lists a CiteScore on their website. CiteScore is a citation metric developed by Elsevier. 

Its “universally prominent” editorial board members, while real people, are not associated with the journal. 

The listed executive editor, Pankaj Mishra, is a researcher at the University of Udine in Italy, according to his website. He did not respond to our request for comment regarding his association with the journal; however, the picture on the IJSIEC website is of novelist and writer Pankaj Mishra. His bio on the journal’s website has a link to an “Interview session” with Mishra but opens to a screenshot of an email from Udine’s Mishra agreeing to be editor of a special issue. The email appears to have been sent to his university-affiliated email address. 

The other editor-in-chief is researcher Pandian Vasant, who prominently lists his position as editor of the Springer Nature journal Intelligent Computing and Optimization on his LinkedIn profile —  with no mention of IJSIEC. Vasant did not respond to our request for comment confirming his association with the journal. 

Although the publisher’s purported address is in London, the ISSN listed on the journal’s cover registers to Egypt – and with a typo in the journal name. A search of the title with no typos was not registered to any ISSN. The company’s director Anitha Mavudi is also listed as the director of five other companies in the UK Government’s business registry. All of those companies are registered at the same mailing address as Walsh Medical Media. 

In an article in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing last May, Graham Kendall, the deputy vice chancellor at MILA University in Nilai, Malaysia, detailed possible connections between Walsh Medical Media and the publishing group OMICS. In 2019 the publisher was ordered to pay the U.S. government $50 million in 2019 for “unfair and deceptive practices.” 

Aside from the metrics, we were unable to verify the metadata of the six articles in the most recent issue. Three papers are labeled “commentry [sic],”two are review articles, and one a research article. All six papers have digital object identifiers, or DOIs, that did not come up in a DOI search. 

Three of the authors of the articles have no record in ORCID or ResearchGate: Andrew Vander of the University of Nevada, Reno, Shang Zhou of Department of Iwate Prefectural University in Japan, and Nguyen Kwok of the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. 

Papers with authors we could verify were seemingly copied from other work, usually by the same author. For example, the review article “Underwater Acoustic Target Recognition in Passive Sonar Using Spectrogram and Modified MobileNet Network Classifier” by Hassan Akbarian and Mohammad Hossein Sedaaghi is nearly identical to “Surface Vessels, Deep Learning, Passive Sonar, Underwater Acoustic Recognition,” published in Advanced defense science technology in 2023 by the same authors. Notably, the paper in Advanced defense science technology also has a fake DOI. 

Akbarian and Sedaaghi did not respond to our request for comment. 

Earlier this year, Anna Abalkina, who is also responsible for the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, wrote about a similar instance of a predatory journal that had an editorial board with fake names, an anonymously registered website domain and potentially back-dated archive. And in 2023, we covered a case of a researcher who found his name on editorial boards of journals he’d never heard of.  

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