Search Results for: fake peer review

30+ papers flagged because editors may have “subverted the peer review process” with fake accounts

In what has become a familiar story, another publisher has found more than 30 papers that appear to have been accepted and published based on fake peer reviews. Hindawi, publisher of more than 400 journals, is having 32 papers re-reviewed after an investigation …identified three Editors who appear to have subverted the peer review process … Continue reading 30+ papers flagged because editors may have “subverted the peer review process” with fake accounts

Elsevier retracting 16 papers for faked peer review

Fake peer reviews: They’re all the rage. Sixteen papers are being retracted across three Elsevier journals after the publisher discovered that one of the authors, Khalid Zaman, orchestrated fake peer reviews by submitting false contact information for his suggested reviewers. This particular kind of scam has been haunting online peer review for a few years now, as loyal Retraction … Continue reading Elsevier retracting 16 papers for faked peer review

Retraction count grows to 35 for scientist who faked emails to do his own peer review

Hyung-In Moon, the South Korean plant compound researcher who made up email addresses so he could do his own peer review, is now up to 35 retractions. The four new retractions are of the papers in the Journal of Enzyme Inhibition and Medicinal Chemistry that initially led to suspicions when all the reviews came back … Continue reading Retraction count grows to 35 for scientist who faked emails to do his own peer review

Journal editor resigned in wake of retractions for fake email addresses that enabled self-peer review

The case of Hyung-In Moon — the researcher who faked email addresses for potential peer reviewers so he could do his own peer review — has already led to one resignation. Emilio Jirillo, the editor of Immunopharmacology and Immunotoxicology, which retracted 20 of Moon’s papers, stepped down earlier this year in the wake of the … Continue reading Journal editor resigned in wake of retractions for fake email addresses that enabled self-peer review

Weekend reads: Nobel Prize winners and retractions; Nature to publish peer reviews automatically; ‘AI or Die’?

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 60,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately … Continue reading Weekend reads: Nobel Prize winners and retractions; Nature to publish peer reviews automatically; ‘AI or Die’?

Springer Nature psycholinguistics journal retracts over a dozen articles for authorship, peer review issues

A journal has retracted 16 papers after a whistleblower flagged it for “irregularities” in peer review, among other concerns.  The Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, a Springer Nature title, published the papers between 2021 and 2024. The articles covered research ranging from studies of the work of Haruki Murakami and Kazakh literature to English reading fluency … Continue reading Springer Nature psycholinguistics journal retracts over a dozen articles for authorship, peer review issues

Paper rejected for AI, fake references published elsewhere with hardly anything changed

One journal’s trash is another’s treasure – until a former peer reviewer stumbles across it and sounds an alarm. In April, communications professor Jacqueline Ewart got a Google Scholar notification about a paper published in the World of Media she had reviewed, and recommended rejecting, for another journal several months earlier. At the time, she … Continue reading Paper rejected for AI, fake references published elsewhere with hardly anything changed

Apparent NCI director candidate wants ‘open, respectful’ post-publication peer review while promoting anonymous site that calls sleuths a ‘mob’

Brown University physician-scientist Wafik El-Deiry has been a longtime critic of the post-publication forum PubPeer, where 75 of his papers have been flagged. For example, in an April post on X, formerly Twitter, he stated, “It is not good that PubPeer has been weaponized and has become tyrannical.” In July 2024, he referred to the … Continue reading Apparent NCI director candidate wants ‘open, respectful’ post-publication peer review while promoting anonymous site that calls sleuths a ‘mob’

Can a better ID system for authors, reviewers and editors reduce fraud? STM thinks so

Unverifiable researchers are a harbinger of paper mill activity. While journals have clues to identifying fake personas — lack of professional affiliation, no profile on ORCID or strings of random numbers in email addresses, to name a few — there isn’t a standard template for doing so.  The International Association of Scientific, Technical, & Medical … Continue reading Can a better ID system for authors, reviewers and editors reduce fraud? STM thinks so

Dozens of Elsevier papers retracted over fake companies and suspicious authorship changes

Since March of last year, Elsevier has pulled around 60 papers connected to companies in the Caucasus region that don’t seem to exist. The retraction notices attribute the decision to suspicious changes in authorship and the authors being unable to verify the existence of their employers. Online sleuths have also flagged potentially manipulated citations among … Continue reading Dozens of Elsevier papers retracted over fake companies and suspicious authorship changes