The 3,000+ journals in the Springer Nature portfolio published over 482,000 articles in 2024, according to data published this week on a new research integrity page on the company’s website. The page also shares a data point you don’t typically get from publishers: 2,923 articles were retracted.
The numbers are a small part of the page, which outlines the tools the publisher uses for quality control, what prompts a research integrity investigation, and what happens during such investigations.
The publisher breaks down the retraction numbers a little more:
- 61.5% (1797 articles) of the retractions were of papers published before January 2023.
- 38.5% (1126) of retractions were for articles published after January 2023.
- 41% of the retractions for content published after January 2023 were for open access articles.
We asked Springer Nature why they chose to share these numbers, and who the intended audience of the page is. Alice Henchley, director of communications, integrity, ethics and editorial policy for the Springer Nature Group, replied:
We created the page to help provide more information on how the accuracy and integrity of research is maintained, particularly in light of the growing interest in how new technologies are impacting the research system. We hope that this transparency will be helpful to the community and further demonstrate our commitment to scientific integrity, both in terms of the rigour we apply prior to acceptance, and the responsibility we take for updating the publication record when concerns are identified after publication.
Among the Springer Nature retractions in the Retraction Watch Database, Environmental Science and Pollution Research tops our list. We reported in August that the journal, which lost its impact factor in June, was cleaning up hundreds of papers for “suspicious citations, tortured phrases and undisclosed use of AI in the journal’s articles.”
Also high on the list: Scientific Reports, which has made headlines here for a retraction on an article full of tortured phrases and others for concerns over paid authorship; and Applied Nanoscience, which retracted 34 papers in special guest-edited issues riddled with problems.
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That works out to 0.61 percent of the “over” 482,000 articles. Fortunately, it seems like a few journals are the bad apples. But how can any one publisher monitor 3,000 journals — that’s absurd!
They can make millions from the journals, why can’t they monitor them. 0.61 retractions don’t mean that 99% of the articles were clean. It means 99% were lucky.
Monitoring them would involve paying people, which eats into their profits.
Springer nature really excellent database for researchers
Among the millions of research articles received by renowned publishers each year, several hundred, if not thousands, articles of dubious content escape the rigours of review scrutiny and get rewarded by publication. Even if minuscule, these are enough to serve as the incipient seed of more such to follow. No mind or rigorous peer review possibly handle such a magnitude of task for nothing. A few black spots are always there to try easy opportunities and get away laughing. A severe condemnation of such black spots in the research community, alongside ridiculing the institutions that support these elements, may possibly be a way forward for some cure.
If you look for extra money, one has to accept the diluted results. What the reviewers and the Editor were doing? All these persons should be debarred from such respective activities for two years as punishment.
2 years? I would have thought that they should not be allowed to participate in the peer review process in the future. They have shown that they cannot be trusted.
While the number of papers that are retracted is very low, this leads to the following problems
1. How many papers didn’t get retracted that should have been
2. We don’t know which papers will get retracted and lead future research in the wrong direction
3. Why aren’t paper that cite the retracted papers also retracted, or a least an expression of concern, as tainted, as fruits of the poisonous tree doctrine
The papers that cite the retracted papers need looking at, but some will be found to only have cited it for context, or in an extreme case even to point out that the now retracted paper was wrong.
The editor of the Springer -Nature and (pubmed indexed) book is co-author on all 17 chapters
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-15-4814-7
He is the editor in chief of the Springer-Nature Journal VirusDisease and published more than 10 papers there.
I guess CONFLICT OF INTEREST does not apply to S.K.Saxena or Indian Editor in chief in general. How hard is to check editor in chief name in the article titles in the publication?
If anything, at least twice as much should have been retracted in Env Sci Poll Res only. Not to mention Sci Reports (equally awful, but with higher volumes) and other dumpster fires like Wireless Pers Comm, Biomass Conversion and Biorefinery, etc., etc.
Springer, scopus, wos is money making machine and they are looting people.
This ‘transparency’ is nothing of the sort. The data trumpeted by the SN staff are readily available by searching the RW database. The content on RW and published analyses of outcomes of assessments of integrity concerns indicate slow, opaque, inconsistent and incomplete processes are common. If publishers wish journal readers to believe they are doing a great job of maintaining publication integrity they should provide more than a bit of frothy verbiage.
Until not long ago, Springer Nature’s website indicated that they had 30 research integrity staff, which didn’t seem much for 3000+ journals. It would be good to know how many staff they have now?
Earlier in my career I was stupid enough (though I am sure I am still an idiot) to be an editor for Scientific Reports (SR) in immunology. At the time, the “section” head editor (or whatever it was called) and a few others in that section were known and respectable folks in the field, and it seems they had had some communication/agreement with SN staff as to what clearly warranted desk rejection BEFORE the editors were involved. The papers I handled for the first year or so appeared to communicate real science conducted in a legitimate effort that was deserving of a serious review and likely a venue to reside. Then something happened and there was significant outsourcing of SR work to what were obviously bots and unqualified email-checking contract workers. There was also significant turnover of public facing SR staff, and this was the same time that Rafal Marszalek was appointed EiC. In the subsequent years every submission (yes 100%) I was asked to handle was obviously written by a paper mill, and the number of submissions they wanted me to handle went up by an order of magnitude — I even received an email from one of the staff with a complaining tone that I should be handling 15 or so papers per month! They would never reply when I explained why the crap they were pushing was obviously not real nor why it should be wasting anyone’s VOLUNTEER time.
My naivety (on this topic) was finally lifted when it became clear this was just a numbers game to try and harvest more APC. I learned that all of the familiar editors in immunology were long gone, replaced with some people you cannot track down. It then took FOUR MONTHS for them to acknowledge my resignation and remove my name from their website. This was with constant prodding.
$2,690 is the current APC for Scientific Reports.