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Animal Ethics Biosafety Human Research Ethics Research Integrity

Scammers impersonate guest editors to get sham papers published – Nature (Holly Else | November 2021)

Posted by Dr Gary Allen in Research Integrity on December 16, 2021
Keywords: Journal, Publication ethics, Research integrity, Research results

The Linked Original Item was Posted On November 8, 2021

Excerpt of a dictionary definition of 'fraud'.

Hundreds of junk-science papers have been retracted from reputable journals after fraudsters used ‘special issues’ to manipulate the publication process. And the problem is growing.

Hundreds of articles published in peer-reviewed journals are being retracted after scammers exploited the processes for publishing special issues to get poor-quality papers — sometimes consisting of complete gibberish — into established journals. In some cases, fraudsters posed as scientists and offered to guest-edit issues that they then filled with sham papers.

An emergent and growing form of shonky paper are papers appearing in special editions of otherwise reputable titles, where the guest editor is a sham.  Given the consequences, how this is polluting scientific literature, this is a serious concern.

Elsevier is withdrawing 165 articles currently in press and plans to retract 300 more that have been published as part of 6 special issues in one of its journals, and Springer Nature is retracting 62 articles published in a special issue of one journal. The retractions come after the publishers each issued expressions of concern earlier this year, covering hundreds of articles.

Science-integrity experts expect that more investigations will come in the months ahead as other titles realize that they have been duped.

“It is very worrying,” says Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, who has worked to uncover nonsense science papers in special issues. He adds that it is shocking to see such papers in journals from ‘flagship’ publishers and that “it is not only predatory journals that publish bullshit”.

Scammers impersonate guest editors to get sham papers published
Hundreds of junk-science papers have been retracted from reputable journals after fraudsters used ‘special issues’ to manipulate the publication process. And the problem is growing.

Related Reading

(Pakistan) The rising menace of scholarly black-market Challenges and solutions for improving research in low-and middle-income countries – JPMA Editorial (Aamir Raoof Memon, Farooq Azam Rathore | June 2021

The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science – Nature (Holly Else & Richard Van Noorden | )

(Australia) Thousands of researchers in Australia appear on editorial boards of ‘predatory’ journals – Nature Index (Dalmeet Singh Chawla | April 2020)

Illegitimate Journals and How to Stop Them: An Interview with Kelly Cobey and Larissa Shamseer – Scholarly Kitchen (Alice Meadows | December 2017)

Potential predatory and legitimate biomedical journals: can you tell the difference? A cross-sectional comparison (Papers: Larissa Shamseer, et al | March 2017)

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