Sleuths spur cleanup at journal with nearly 140 retractions and counting

A journal that lost its impact factor in June is in the midst of a cleanup operation, issuing nearly 140 retractions so far this year. 

The mass retractions began over a year after sleuths Alexander Magazinov and Guillaume Cabanac first raised concerns about the presence of suspicious citations, tortured phrases and undisclosed use of AI in the journal’s articles. 

Cabanac and Magazinov have now flagged 1,850 articles from the journal, Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research (ESPR), with the Problematic Paper Screener, which looks for evidence of bad practices in academic papers. 

Most of the flagged articles ran afoul of the “Feet of Clay” detector, which looks for articles that cite retracted material. The detector makes use of the Retraction Watch database, which is now part of Crossref.  

More than 100 papers contained tortured language, nonstandard phrases which are sometimes the result of a rewriting extension called SpinBot, Cabanac told us. Cabanac said the “tortured phrases” label applies only to articles with five or more occurrences to avoid false positives. “This means that a lot of ESPR articles are not shown,” he said. 

For example, the March 2019 paper “Environmental factors affecting the frequency of road traffic accidents: a case study of sub-urban area of Pakistan” states “3000 individuals kick the bucket” from road traffic accidents, rather than saying “people die,” Cabanac pointed out on PubPeer. The authors also used the phrases “monetary misfortunes” instead of “financial damages” and “creating nations” in place of “developing countries.” The paper was retracted in March. 

Hafiz Mohkum Hammad, the corresponding author on the article and a researcher at Muhammad Nawaz Shareef University of Agriculture in Punjab, Pakistan, did not respond to our request for comment. 

Other papers seem to have been drafted with undisclosed use of AI, as was the case for the September 2023 paper “Revitalizing our earth: unleashing the power of green energy in soil remediation for a sustainable future.” Section 3 of the paper ends in the phrase “Regenerate response,” a button in ChatGPT that generates text, as we previously reported. “Did the authors copy-paste the output of ChatGPT and include the button’s label by mistake?” Cabanac asked in his PubPeer comment calling out the mistake. The paper was retracted in July, but the notice does not mention undisclosed AI use as a reason. 

The corresponding author of the paper, Kangyan Li, did not respond to our request for comment.

In November 2022, Magazinov contacted the journal’s editor-in-chief, Philippe Garrigues, a CNRS researcher based in Bordeaux, France. He called out a paper published in a different journal for which “more than a quarter of its total” citations came from ESPR. 

“Should we suspect that referees or editors of Environmental Science and Pollution Research engage in citation extortion? Please check. No doubt your journal needs a major cleanup,” Magazinov said in the email.

In a follow-up email to Garrigues the next day, Cabanac introduced himself, and said the “issues Dr. Magazinov sent are really concerning; I believe they should be taken seriously.”

As previously reported by Retraction Watch, Garrigues assured Cabanac the journal was taking action. “This is not over,” he wrote in French.

In April 2023, after no further responses from Garrigues or the journal, Cabanac alerted the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) about “20+ papers with tortured phrases” in the publication. 

An officer from COPE emailed the journal and Springer Nature to ask if the journal was looking into the matter, and what the current status of the follow-up was.

Tim Kersjes, a research integrity advisor for Springer Nature, responded, saying the “journal and the publisher are still investigating and reviewing the matter as part of a larger investigation.” 

Kersjes also said the publisher would inform Cabanac “once we have made a determination for postpublication corrective action.” That was the last Cabanac heard from the journal, although COPE followed up several times in June 2023, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.

“It’s a bit frustrating when you’re pouring so many efforts in pro bono and you don’t even get feedback from the publisher,” Cabanac told us.

Since February 2024, the journal has retracted 136 papers by our count. The most recent retraction came August 2. 

Chris Graf, research integrity director at Springer Nature, told us the retractions “are the result of ongoing investigations by our research integrity unit, which have also been informed by concerns raised externally.” He also said the papers were retracted for a variety of reasons, and “the use of LLMs [large language models] has not been identified in all cases.” 

Identical retraction notices have been issued for many of the articles: 

An investigation by the publisher found a number of articles, including this one, with a number of concerns, including but not limited to compromised peer review process, inappropriate or irrelevant references, containing nonstandard phrases or not being in scope of the journal.

Clarivate, which calculates impact factors for journals based on citations to papers, did not give ESPR an updated version of the closely watched metric this year. At the time, a representative for Springer Nature said they were “disappointed” by that decision and would investigate Clarivate’s concerns regarding the journal. 

The journal is currently marked as “on hold” on the Clarivate website, which says “[c]oncerns have been raised about the quality of the content published in this journal” and that it is being “re-evaluated” and could be removed from the Web of Science index altogether. 

Robert Mendelsohn, the editor-in-chief of the Climate Change Economics, blamed “too many citations” from ESPR for the suppression of his journal’s impact factor. 

Springer Nature recently announced plans to use AI tools to detect AI-generated content and problematic images. When we asked about these tools, Cabanac said he’d be “happier” if the publishers would “hire more research integrity staff and trained them properly,” and if editorial board members were “picked more carefully.” 

Graf also told us Springer Nature was “updating the Editors and Editorial Board” of the journal “to ensure a focus on research integrity and robust manuscript handling, and instituting a stricter special issue protocol, supported by our research integrity unit.”

Cabanac said he thought journals undergoing investigation should at least post a disclosure statement to warn researchers who plan on submitting to the journal. Without such a statement, he said, “most potential authors won’t know about the journal’s history and they are entitled to feel misled.”

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