A university investigation in Hong Kong found that a professor used the email account of a former student to conduct all the correspondence needed to edit special issues of two journals, Retraction Watch has learned.
The two special issues, which were published last year, are full of articles with the hallmarks of paper mills, said Dorothy Bishop, an Oxford psychologist and scientific sleuth who flagged the matter to the institution involved in the case.
Last November, Bishop emailed the president of Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) with the information that Kaifa Zhao, a PhD student at the university, was listed as the lead editor for two special issues of the Journal of Environmental and Public Health and Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, both journals published by Hindawi. The nearly 300 articles in the special issues were “mostly meaningless gobbledegook” that suggested they came from a paper mill, she wrote.
The episode is the latest of many problems involving questionable peer review of special issues – and subsequent retractions – we’ve covered.
Continue reading Exclusive: Prof stole former student’s identity to edit two journal special issues