The Scottish Medical Journal has retracted more than a dozen papers dating back to 2020 after concluding the articles were likely produced by one or more paper mills.
The articles, all by researchers in China, covered a range of topics including back pain, pancreatic cancer, hand hygiene and sepsis. Most were meta-analyses.
Here’s the blanket notice for the 13 papers, which the publisher, Sage, lists by url but not title:
Toxicologic Pathology – a Sage title – has issued expressions of concern for six papers that were among the subjects of an investigation by Azabu University that concluded in November 2022.
The expression of concern, dated March 7, 2024, includes a list of the six articles and reads:
A journal and publisher have retracted three papers about abortion, including one that has been used in court cases to support the suspension of FDA approval for mifepristone, aka an “abortion pill.”
For one of those articles, initially flagged by a reader, “an independent reviewer with expertise in statistical analyses evaluated the concerns and opined that the article’s presentation of the data in Figures 2 and 3 leads to an inaccurate conclusion and that the composition of the cohort studied has problems that could affect the article’s conclusions,” according to the notice.
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.
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.
In the midst of a tumultuous year, the journal Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications, a Sage title, is retracting 21 papers after an investigation identified signs of “compromised” peer review.
Clarivate delisted the journal from its Web of Science index in March for failing to meet editorial quality criteria. Founding editor Biren Prasad, who managed the journal since 1992, also retired earlier this year, and the publisher took over management of peer review.
The journal’s online presence also needs attention: Neither of the associate editors listed on its website have been involved for many years, both told Retraction Watch – and one has threatened to sue the journal if she isn’t removed.
Sage Publishing is retracting 37 articles from an engineering journal after finding “indicators of third party involvement” in the peer review process.
The publisher’s investigation continues, and more papers may be retracted, a spokesperson for the company told Retraction Watch.
A single retraction notice lists the links of the 37 papers to be retracted from Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part E: Journal of Process Mechanical Engineering. The notice states:
A cancer journal has retracted a 2016 paper by a group in China after deciding – more than five years after publication – it couldn’t stand behind the work.
Finding papers produced by paper mills has become a major headache for many of the world’s largest publishers over the past year, and they’re largely playing catch-up since sleuths began identifying them a few years ago. But there may be a new way: Earlier this month, Adam Day, a data scientist at SAGE Publishing, posted a preprint on arXiv that used a variety of methods to search for duplication in peer review comments, based on the likelihood that paper mills “create fake referee accounts and use them to submit fake peer-review reports.” We asked Day several questions about the approach.
Retraction Watch (RW): Tell us a bit about the methods you used.
