Category: sage

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.

Continue reading Guest post: A look behind the scenes of bulk retractions from Sage

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. 

Continue reading ‘Prompt and decisive’: Editor says obesity study will be retracted after critique

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.

Continue reading Turmoil at Sage journal as retractions mount

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: 

Continue reading Sage retracting three dozen articles for ‘compromised’ peer review

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. 

The article, “The preoperative platelet–lymphocyte ratio versus neutrophil–lymphocyte ratio: which is better as a prognostic factor in oral squamous cell carcinoma?”, appeared in Therapeutic Advances in Medical Oncology, a SAGE title. The authors were led by Shan Chen, of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. 

The notice reads: 

Continue reading Retraction leads to review change at SAGE journal

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.

Continue reading How to find evidence of paper mills using peer review comments

A SAGE journal has retracted 122 papers because of “clear indicators that the submission and/or peer review process for these papers was manipulated.”

Those indicators, according to The International Journal of Electrical Engineering & Education: 

include but are not limited to submission patterns consistent with the use of paper mills, collusion between authors and reviewers during the review process, inappropriate subject matter as compared to the Journal’s Aims and Scope, poor quality peer review and requests for inappropriate citation.

A look at the first three titles suggests that they were, indeed, far out of scope:

Continue reading Journal retracts 122 papers at once

A psychiatry journal has retracted two papers on Covid-19 and mental health, and a third on racism, after concluding that an author on the articles rigged the peer-review process. 

The papers, which appeared in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry (IJSP), were co-authored by Debanjan Banerjee, then geriactric psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bengaluru, and his colleagues. 

Banerjee, who has since left the institution, was also until recently a “trainee editor” at the journal, as Neuroskeptic noted on Twitter last week, as well as an associate editor of the Journal of Psychosexual Health — both of which are SAGE titles. He’s also an associate editor for the Frontiers journal Aging Psychiatry.

According to the IJSP: 

Continue reading Journal retracts three papers — including two on COVID-19 — because ‘trainee editor’ committed misconduct

The publisher SAGE is in the process of retracting more than 30 papers across three of its journals after determining that they were churned out by paper mills — prompting the company to take a closer look at its policies and procedures. 

The suspect papers were initially flagged by Elisabeth Bik and others as part of a group of some 400 articles that showed signs of having been milled. As we reported in March, a dozen of the articles were hit with expressions of concern — prompting some head-scratching from Bik, in particular, about why they weren’t being retracted outright. 

A spokesperson for SAGE told us: 

Continue reading Publisher retracting more than 30 articles from paper mills

Eight months after a psychology journal retracted a pair of articles that were “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda,” the publication has pulled three more papers — all at least a quarter century old — for the same reason. 

All five papers were written by J. Philippe Rushton, formerly of the University of Western Ontario, who died in 2012.  As we wrote in December 2020, Rushton published dubious studies that promoted tropes of white supremacy, including that Blacks are less intelligent than whites and that:

Continue reading Journal retracts more articles for being “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda”