An Elsevier journal has retracted 47 papers that an accomplished sleuth says appear to have been generated by a paper mill.
The articles, by researchers from countries including China, Kazakhstan and Russia appeared in Thinking Skills and Creativity.
Here’s a sample notice, for a paper titled “Steal like an artist: Connection between critical thinking and creativity of a future musician in a digital environment,” whose authors come from Shandong University of Science and Technology and, somewhat improbably, the Department of Music at the Shandong Institute of Petroleum and Chemical Technology:
After a thorough investigation, the Editors have concluded that the acceptance of this article was partly based upon the positive advice of one illegitimate reviewer report. The report was submitted from an email account which was provided to the journal as a suggested reviewer during the submission of the article. Although purportedly a real reviewer account, the Editors have concluded that this was not of an appropriate, independent reviewer.
This manipulation of the peer-review process represents a clear violation of the fundamentals of peer review, our publishing policies, and publishing ethics standards. Apologies are offered to the reviewer whose identity was assumed and to the readers of the journal that this deception was not detected during the submission process.
Ah, the peer review scam, as described by us in…2014 in Nature.
The same notice now appears for “Influence of piano playing on logical thinking formation of future musicians,” “Peculiarities of creative thinking development within the educational piano playing course,” and others.
The journal is retracting another paper, “The role of applied problems in the training of future mathematics teachers in the 21st century,” by a group from Kazakhstan, after determining that three bogus reviewers recommended publication of the article.
At least one of the articles involves COVID-19.
We emailed Pam Burnard, the editor of the journal, who passed along our queries to a publisher at Elsevier, who did not respond, either.
But Andrew Davis, a spokesperson for the company, told us that the journal became aware of issues in February after Anna Abalkina commented on Twitter about a half-dozen papers that struck her as having come from a paper mill. (She noted that she did not receive a response when she pointed out the suspect articles to Elsevier.) Abalkina’s name should be familiar to readers of Retraction Watch; she’s the creator of the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker.
Davis said that on the same day as Abalkina’s tweet:
the journal Publisher, alerted the Editors-in-Chief of the journal and our ethics team, and a few days after that the publisher provided ethics with the list of suspect reviewer accounts.
The ethics team confirmed then the suspicions on the initially provided reviewer accounts and we also found new illegitimate reviewer accounts.
During the investigation genuine persons whose names were apparently used to create the illegitimate reviewer accounts were contacted, as well as a number of other illegitimate reviewer accounts which likely were created by inventing names. We contacted around 70 reviewer accounts, all suggested upon the submission of the papers.
The corresponding authors were requested to comment on the allegations and eventually the Editors decided the retraction of 47 papers (in May 2022).
Davis added that the case is now closed.
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I hope Elsevier also gets to invite for publication those articles that they rejected based on the negative advice of an illegitimate reviewer!
It would be worthwhile finding out if this journal had a certain dependence on Open Access submissions and hence paper charges, which tends to encourage a less rigorous peer review process.
The other thing is that it is pretty remarkable that a top legacy journal does not have a system that routinely checks for paper mill submissions. There is the software available to do that, as there is for checking potential plagiarism. This was some time ago, but it is surprising that the publisher is not checking back. I am also surprised that the editor did not note these issues.
When I was an editor with an Elsevier journal I always inspected submissions (we had one submission a day, so it was quite a job along with all the others being reviewed – I would review 20-30 manuscripts each weekend!) and desk-rejected about half of them (on grounds of scope and quality). And we would hardly ever accept reviewers on the suggestion of an author, unless we were running out of options.
Hardly surprising. I ended up vetting for 5 to 8 hours a day when covid hit. I was paid a tiny stipend as a journal manager for elsevier, so should have been 10 to 20 mins a day. This is abusive practice on the part of the publisher and mostly affects women. Elsevier wasn’t interested when I raised it, so I resigned. Shame. They just found another post grad to do it. The editor was not paid enough to justify the work she put in either.
I have completely stopped working now, between the publishers and the dreadful research funding system, its impossible to carry out any decent studies.
Perhaps the reasons for these abusive practices can be rationalized with the following statement, found in the “RELX Annual Report and Financial Statements 2021” available here (see on page 22):
https://www.relx.com/investors/annual-reports/2021
“In the primary research market, Elsevier aims to deliver journal and article quality above the industry average at below average cost, leveraging its scale and expertise.”
Note that the “article quality” concept is a rather subjective concept, while the “cost” is just a hard fact. So, it is not very surprising if the balance is swinging more in favor of low costs. QED.
Waaa look! You suffer to write a good paper and they give you bogus reports and a rejection it some on funny racist grounds while others get good report and acceptance from bogus reviewers.
Those who know how to play the game will always get published, and those who don’t , will not!
I am very suspicious of someone who has too many publications in a short period of time outside of the turnaround time frame to publishing. It is ridiculous. But that is what they want-people will always find a way to game the system.
Papers on piano education from petroleum engineers struck a bad chord with Anna? Funny that papers on music education are beneficial to the careers of engineers.
Considering the Engineering Institute with the Music Dept. was in China, it doesn’t sound so farfetched. One major error that U.S. of A. schools made was removing Music & Arts programs from public schools. The combination of music with Sciences & Maths is extremely important for grasping concepts. No wonder the US is falling behind.
The problem is much more complex than what many people think!
1) The journals have to cover a wide range of areas for their own survival
2) Now a days, the quantum of knowledge even in sub disciplines is too much and the growth of this knowledge is too rapid
3) consequent of 2) it’s difficult for many researchers to keep up with this pace
4) Consequent of 3) several reviewers are heavily depending on Plagiarism Checkers!
5) Due to severe lack of Proper Knowledgeable Reviewers, several journals are just selecting reviewers if they have published sometimes even one paper in a reasonably good journal!
It so happened to me that my still working PhD students became reviewers just because they published one paper in one good journal!
6) Besides the above problems we always have this age old, quid pro cuo!