An Elsevier journal has pulled three articles after the publisher determined an author had been “involved in the peer review and decision making” as managing guest editor of the special issues in which they appeared.
The author, botany researcher Vijay Kumar of Lovely Professional University in Punjab, India, told Retraction Watch his apparent involvement in assigning reviewers was “purely unintentional” and a “foolish mistake.”
Two of the articles appeared in a special issue section of the South African Journal of Botany in 2022. They were:
- “Optimization of lycorine using Response Surface Methodology, extraction methods and in vitro antioxidant and anti-diabetic activities from the roots of Giant Spider Lily: A medicinally important bulbous herb,” and
- “The potential of plant-derived secondary metabolites as novel drug candidates against Klebsiella pneumoniae: Molecular docking and simulation investigation.”
A third paper, “In vitro propagation and assessment of genetic fidelity in Dioscorea deltoidea, a potent diosgenin yielding endangered plant,” appeared online in a different special section in August 2020.
In August 2023, an anonymous user posted a screenshot of the 2020 paper on PubPeer that listed Kumar as both an author and editor of the article. A commenter with a different username posted about the other papers the following August.
Elsevier retracted the 2020 article in October, and pulled the other two earlier this month.
The retraction notices for each article are nearly identical. They state:
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief as the reliability of the peer-review process of the article cannot be guaranteed.
After a thorough investigation, the Editor and publisher have concluded that the Managing Guest Editor of the Special Issue, Dr. Vijay Kumar, was also an author of the article and involved in the peer review and decision making.
As such this represents an abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.
The corresponding author of one of the articles “claimed that they were unaware that Dr. Vijay Kumar was involved in the peer review process for the paper, and do not agree with the retraction,” according to the retraction notice. The author, Namrata Misra of the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology in Odisha, India, declined to comment.
Two of the webpages for the notices themselves contain different text than what appears on the article pages. One includes what appears to be an internal communication, with instructions to “Specify details needed for R&R panel to evaluate the case.” Another states the article “is an accidental duplication” of an article previously published in the journal, and has been withdrawn.
Kumar told us other co-guest editors had handled the papers and assigned reviewers. Then, during revisions, “the revised manuscript was assigned to me by the journal (as a managing guest editor) and by mistake I sent to the same reviewers, which was purely unintentional.” He continued, “I agreed with these retractions with my full responsibility.”
Two other papers on which Kumar was a coauthor were retracted in 2023 after PubPeer users raised concerns about duplicated images.
An Elsevier spokesperson confirmed the publisher was investigating how Kumar’s apparent involvement in the processing of his own manuscripts could have escaped notice before publication. The spokesperson referred us to updated journal policies on guest editors, which state:
The guest editor must not be involved in the handling or decisions about papers which s/he has authored or co-authored him/herself, or have been written by family members, colleagues, or which relate to products/ services in which other conflicts of interest are present. Furthermore, any such submission must be subject to all the journal’s usual procedures. Peer review must be handled independently of the relevant author/editor and their research groups, and there will be a clear statement to this effect on any such paper that is published.
The policy also states a guest editor should not submit more than one article to their special issue.
One of Kumar’s recent articles in Current Plant Biology, another Elsevier title, contains the following statement as part of the section on competing interests:
Dr Vijay Kumar and Prof. Karel Dolezal are guest editors for the special issue in Current Plant Biology, as such, Dr. Kumar and Prof. Dolezal have not been involved in any stage of the evaluation and decision making of this submission. This status had no bearing on the editorial consideration of the manuscript.
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Foolish only because it was caught.
An ugly and preventable situation if appropriate conflict of interest procedures had have been in place. Not sure if this is now the general landscape at Elsevier, or whether this is journal specific [and determined by the Editor-in-Chief]?
I used to be a Senior Editor at NeuroImage [before the entire editorial board resigned & essentially moved the journal to another publisher]. We had strict procedures to guard against these sorts of situations – Elsevier’s editorial software was perfectly capable of handling these cases both for regular issues of the journal, as well as special issues. Indeed, for special issues guest editors were assigned a regular journal editor to work with. That way the regular editor could help shepherd the guest editors through trickier parts of the editorial process, and also prevent any shenanigans from “accidentally” taking place. Can’t understand why people find this so difficult…
“Lovely Professional University”
I saw that on a paper once and looked it up.
“Hope you like the story behind this brand name. Let’s start their story from their word of mouth. Baldev Raj Mittal, father of the LPU founder stared Lovely Sweets in 1961 which later became a brand name in Jalandhar. He started his business with ‘Lovely Sweet Shop’ in Jalandhar cantonment’s Sadar Bazaar and later went on to become the founder of ‘Lovely Group’. Lovely Professional University is founded and run by the same group and hence the name. Started, to be precise, with Lovely Sweet Shop in Jalandhar cantonments Sadar Bazaar. The brainchild of Baldev Raj Mittal, a small-time military contractor, it began life in 1961 as a modest….”
https://ask.shiksha.com/what-is-the-history-of-lpu-qna-7134959