Science of the Total Environment (STOTEN) has retracted 165 papers this year, most for “suspicious” changes in authorship or editorial conflicts of interest.
The retractions have come after STOTEN was delisted from Clarivate’s Web of Science in November after the index put it on hold due to concerns about article quality. The journal published over 10,000 articles in 2024; so far this year it has published fewer than 1,000.
The retractions, most of which were issued in August, applied to articles published from 2018 to 2025. At least 50 of the papers were handled by associate editors who had “an ongoing collaboration on a co-publication” or “an extensive record of collaboration” with the authors of the articles, according to the notices.
Other notices cite changes in authorship between submission and revised or published versions of the paper without approval from editors, a move which can indicate paper mill activity. Other reasons for retraction included plagiarism and tortured phrases and data concerns.
Jörg Rinklebe, a soil and groundwater management researcher at the University of Wuppertal in Germany, lost 10 papers, the most for any author. Eight of them were retracted because the paper’s handling editor had previously co-published with him or with other authors, the retraction notices state. In a statement to Retraction Watch, Rinklebe said he did not “appoint, request, or control the handling editors” for his papers.
“At the time, I did not understand my previous professional collaborations with the assigned editors to constitute a disqualifying conflict under the policies and practices then applicable,” he said. “I complied with the disclosure requirements presented to me through the applicable submission procedures.”
According to Elsevier’s guidance on duties for editors, editors “must not be involved in decisions about papers which they have written themselves or have been written by family members or colleagues.” The page doesn’t define “colleague” but its guidance for reviewers gives an example of a conflict of interest as “collaborations between the reviewer and author(s) in the previous three years.”
Several of the editors named in the retraction notices have been removed from STOTEN’s website. One of them, former associate editor Daniel Tsang, was named in six retraction notices to Rinklebe’s papers, once as a coauthor and five as an editor. He did not respond to our request for comment.
Five of the papers will join our list of nearly 700 retracted COVID-19 articles, three for changes in authorship. One such article, on the environmental life cycle of medical waste during the pandemic, has been cited 100 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
One of Rinklebe’s papers was also retracted because two authors were added during revisions, although one was later removed. He did not respond to our question regarding how the changes came about.
“What I object to is the retrospective application of responsibility to me for editorial decisions made within Elsevier’s own system, particularly where the system itself raised no objection at the time and where no evidence of interference with the scientific review has been presented,” Rinklebe said.
While STOTEN retracted several papers for authorship changes, it corrected at least four others to remove researchers who were “added to the paper without authorisation or validation by the editor at the time of review,” which the notices state was against journal policy.
One of the corrections, issued this April for a paper on plant pollutants, removed authors Randeep Rakwal of the University of Tsukuba in Japan and Ganesh Kumar Agrawal of Research Laboratory for Agricultural Biotechnology and Biochemistry Nepal in Kathmandu. The duo lost a paper from another Elsevier journal in 2019 for plagiarism.
When we asked why some authorship changes warranted correction and others retraction, a representative for Elsevier told us each case was assessed individually. The representative also said “the contributions of the authors concerned didn’t warrant authorship status, but their contributions were valid, hence the research itself wasn’t retracted but the authorship was corrected.”
Clarivate recently lifted a hold on Heliyon, another Elsevier journal placed on hold in 2024. In a recent post about the publisher’s investigation, Elsevier said it was strengthening its focus on pre-publication checks and would “redeploy” their post-publication review “for other investigations.”
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In the scheme of things 100+ papers do not matter. Elsevier is still driving the bus without any chance that the Dutch government will sanction Elsevier. Such a profitable Dutch-based company will be filling the Dutch government’s coffees, will only be in the Dutch government’s good book. You know that a + in one column can be transferred to another column. That’s how the Venetians invented capitalism. Very difficult to eradicate that from scientific publishing, but in ideal world is what we should have.
That should read: Such a profitable Dutch-based company will be filling the Dutch government’s coffers!
Citation indexing has been a scam since ISI in Philadelphia in the early 1970s. AI will pervert it further now that it has been shown to fabricate article citations in law articles. Just a matter of time before actual tort losses for real science malpractice due to “mal-citation” start to accumulate. There is fertile monetary despoil for aggressive litigation of the funding and professional conduct abuses arising from or abetted by the citation scamming journalism abuse. After all, citation indexing is just a proxy for incestuous relationships amongst persons interested in gaining wealth from a shared interest and activity. AI may turn out to be toxic for this type of incestuous derivative insider trading.
One important detail is not mentioned in this article: at the time of these articles (being submitted/published) STOTEN actually allowed the (submitting) author to select (yes select) the editor of their choice. The idea was of course to pick an editor in your field. However, as you can guess, this system was abused by many to select the editor they know. This is a rather peculiar detail that is not mentioned and that potentially cast a shadow on the idea that the authors ‘didn’t know who the editor’ was or had no saying in the choice of the editor.
Shameless behavior by a few individuals can end up damaging the entire reputation of a journal and undermining the credibility of all the papers published in it. People invest years of hard work, time, and effort into their research, and it is deeply unfortunate when the actions of a few make all of that effort seem worthless or even negatively perceived.
At least 7 of the papers retracted so far for author-editor conflicts were handled by the former Editor in Chief – Damia Barcelo. These papers were co-authored by researchers he frequently published with – Muhammad Bilal, Huu Hao Ngo (then an associate editor at STOTEN), and Yolanda Pico. Other editors involved in this process (besides Daniel C.W. Tsang mentioned above) were Huu Hao Ngo, Daniel A. Alessi, Jiamin Chen, Qilin Wang, Deyi Hou, Filip M.G. Tack, and Pingqing Fu. Sometimes that handled the manuscripts of their fellow editors that they also published with. Some of their own papers were also retracted.
Damia Barcelo, Huu Hao Ngo, and Jörg Rinklebe met as plenary speakers at the Green Technologies for Sustainable Environment conference, which took place exactly 2 years ago (September 22-26, 2024) at Poznań University of Technology in Poland. Other plenary speakers included Ashok Pandey and Long D. Nghiem.
Huu Hao Ngo has the most retractions as an editor currently. He has 23 retractions as editor because he edited these papers for his frequent co-authors. It’s obvious that STOTEN has (had?) serious issues. The questions now is whether they will retract all the other papers too with such conflicts of interest.
This has become a very profitable business to many at the cost of many researchers hard work