Category: by publisher

The publisher Sage has retracted 209 articles from an engineering journal after an investigation found “compromised peer review or 3rd party involvement,” according to a company spokesperson.  

The retractions, all from the International Journal of Electrical Engineering & Education, stem from an investigation that led Sage to retract 122 papers – as well as fire the editor-in-chief and purge the editorial board – in December 2021. 

At that time, the company marked 318 additional papers “with more complex issues” with expressions of concern as it continued investigating. All of the papers retracted today previously had expressions of concern. 

The 209 articles were retracted with five different notices. Some articles “contain indicators of third-party involvement” and the corresponding authors “were unable to provide a satisfactory explanation,” one read. 

When I began my graduate work almost 15 years ago, retractions of papers in academic journals were rare, reserved mainly for clear misconduct or serious errors. Today, rarity has given way to routine, with retractions coming more often and increasingly in bulk. 

Sage is not immune to large-scale retractions, nor are we passive observers of their growth. As Retraction Watch wrote, we were “one of the first publishers to recognize large-scale peer review manipulation and begin retracting papers in bulk nine years ago.” Recently, we issued some major retractions; just in the last few months, we put out 37 from Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and 21 from Concurrent Engineering. And there are more to come. 

While we don’t celebrate this type of action, the news is not all bad. The high numbers of retractions at times reflect a problem of industrialized cheating, but also, as in our case, a belief that rigorous scholarship – robustly reviewed by researchers who are experts in their fields – can and should improve the world. Sage was founded on this principle, and it guides everything we do. 

We take our role of vigorously correcting the academic record very seriously because we believe in the scholarly process. We also know that every part of the process is managed by humans with biases (conscious or unconscious), agendas, heavy workloads, and – at times – dubious incentives.  

As research integrity manager at Sage, I work to safeguard the credibility of the research published in more than 60,000 articles every year across more than 1,100 journals. In my role, I see a lot of unethical practices: peer review rings, where researchers unfairly influence the review process; paper mills that produce mass-fabricated research papers, and the brazen trend of selling authorship or entire papers on private or public forums. When it comes to preventing and correcting this type of action,  much goes on behind the scenes.

In February, David Allison came across a study with a familiar problem. 

The authors of the study purported to show an educational program helped women lose weight, but they had not directly compared the treatment and control groups. Instead, they’d used a statistically invalid method to compare changes within the groups. 

Allison, the dean at Indiana University’s School of Public Health in Bloomington, along with researcher Luis-Enrique Becerra-Garcia and other colleagues, in July submitted a critique of the study to the journal that had published it. Four days later, Nauman Khalid, the journal’s editor in chief, wrote to the study’s lead author. 

“I got excellent feedback from Dr. Becerra-Garcia,” Khalid wrote. “According to their analysis, the statistical tool that you used in your research is wrong and not well-validated.” 

Now, after a lack of adequate response from the authors, the study will be retracted, according to Khalid.