BMJ’s Journal of Medical Genetics has retracted the bulk of a seven-year-old special issue for an “irreparably compromised” review process and “improbable device use.”
Of the eight papers in the 2019 special issue, seven were retracted, including an editorial that “almost exclusively” referred to the other now-retracted papers, according to a statement from the journal.
According to the retraction notice published today, the journal’s investigation found the guest editor for the issue selected the peer reviewers, the majority of whom were affiliated with Nanjing University in China. The guest editor is not named in the issue. The publisher’s investigation also found evidence of compromised peer review in almost all articles, the notice states.
The articles were submitted in response to a call for papers for “Genomic aspects of cancer immunotherapy: Challenges and clinical implications.” Two of the papers in the special issue were on methods in cancer immunotherapy, five on immunogenetics, and one on functional genomics. Collectively, the eight retracted articles have been cited nearly 350 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The retraction notice also refers to “evidence of improbable device use in many articles” as a second motivator for the bulk retraction. Caroline White, media relations manager at the BMJ Group, told us this refers to the “type of issue that arises when the same device is used by two people who are supposed to be entirely independent of each other.” White declined to explain exactly what this means, citing legal concerns.
White also said the problems came to light via “tools that highlight potential problems in published articles,” noting the tools “only became available in the past 2-3 years.”
When asked for the name of the guest editor, she told us it was the publisher’s policy “not to go into specific details of retraction cases.”
The retractions were scheduled to be published at 6:30 p.m. ET today and were included in an embargoed notice for journalists. But they were published early in what White told us was a “mistake made by the technical team.”
None of the corresponding authors immediately responded to our request for comment. All of the authors on the retracted papers listed affiliations with institutions in China, including Nanjing University, and several co-authored more than one article.
The only article in the special issue that was not retracted was a breast cancer case report by researchers at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
Huw Dorkins, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Genetics, said in a statement: “This topic collection was really out of scope for the journal, and accepted under a different editorial regime, when different processes applied. We have since reviewed our policies and improved our practice around topic collections.”
Guest-edited special issues appear to be particularly vulnerable to paper mills. Amid its retraction of more than 10,000 papers between late 2022 and early 2024, Hindawi temporarily suspended publishing special issues in 2023 because of “compromised articles.” In 2024, a Springer Nature journal retracted 34 papers from special issues for “compromised editorial handling and peer review process.” The same year, Annals of Operations Research retracted an entire special issue over concerns about “compromised” peer review.
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