Category: sage

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”

Move over, Reviewer 2: The legal reviewer wants your job. 

Last month, I was relieved when the journal Research Ethics published my article, “The Use of Confidentiality and Anonymity Protections as a Cover for Fraudulent Fieldwork Data.” One unexpected hurdle had almost thwarted publication. The problem wasn’t with the proverbial hard-to-please peer reviewer called Reviewer 2. Rather, the problem was with a behind-the-scenes reviewer of a different sort, Legal Reviewer 1.

I suspect that many authors have never heard of a legal reviewer. Yet depending on your research topics, you may have had your manuscripts delayed—or even rejected—without ever knowing of the powerful influence of persons in that role. In my case, the journal editor was candid in telling me that my manuscript would be sent to a “legal team” after clearing peer review.

Continue reading The peer reviewers and editor wanted to publish my paper. The legal team rejected it.

An integrative health journal has retracted a 2019 paper two months after issuing an expression of concern about the article distancing itself from the work. 

The paper, which appeared in Global Advances in Health and Medicine, was a review of “energy medicine” by Christina Ross, of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. 

As we reported in March, Ross told us that a reader in England complained to the journal for her suggestion in the paper: 

Continue reading Paper on ‘energy medicine’ retracted after reader complaints

When researchers in Italy published a paper last November claiming to have found evidence of SARS-CoV-2 in that country as early as September 2019 —  four months before the first official case of Covid-19 — the World Health Organization took immediate notice. 

According to Reuters, the WHO asked the group — with ties to Italy’s National Cancer Institute (INT) — for more information and a chance

“to discuss and arrange for further analyses of available samples and verification of the neutralization results”.

As WebMD reported then: 

If the initial history of the pandemic shifts, public health officials may need to consider new screening tools to test people who don’t have COVID-19 symptoms. Better screening could contain future waves of the pandemic and asymptomatic spread, the authors wrote.

Now, Tumori Journal, which published the study, has expressed concern about the findings. More precisely, the journal says it has doubts about the peer review process that vetted the paper. 

Continue reading Paper claiming presence of SARS-CoV-2 in Italy in 2019 earns expression of concern

A journal has issued a dozen expressions of concern over articles that a group of data sleuths had flagged last year on PubPeer as showing signs of having been cranked out by a paper mill. 

The 12 articles were published between 2017 and 2019 in the International Journal of Immunopathology and Pharmacology and were written by authors in China. They carry the same notice: 

Continue reading Journal flags a dozen papers as likely paper mill products a year after sleuths identified them

An integrative health journal has issued an expression of concern for an article it published two years ago last month about the “human biofield” and related topics after receiving complaints that the piece lacked scientific “validity.” 

The article, “Energy Medicine: Current Status and Future Perspectives,” appeared in Global Advances in Health and Medicine, a SAGE title. The author was Christina Ross, of the Wake Forest Center for Integrative Medicine, in Winston-Salem, N.C. Which happens to be where the two top editors of the journal are based.

Ross also is the author of Etiology: How to Detect Disease in Your Energy Field Before It Manifests in Your Body, which is available on Amazon and elsewhere. 

According to the abstract of the article: 

Continue reading “I absolutely stand by the validity of the science” says author of energy field paper now flagged by journal