Springer Nature has retracted 44 papers from a journal in the Middle East after determining that they were rubbish.
The articles, which showed up in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences starting earlier this year, many of which involve at least some researchers based in China, and from their titles appear to be utter gibberish — yet managed still to pass through Springer Nature’s production system without notice.
The retractions follow the flagging of more than 400 papers by the publisher for concerns about “serious research integrity” breaches in the articles. Those concerns were first surfaced by a commenter on PubPeer and by a group of researchers who have been identifying and exposing nonsense papers.
The editor of a special issue in which the articles appeared told us in August that his email had been hacked — a problem we’ve seen several times before.
Here’s an example of the retraction notices, this one for “Monitoring and early warning of loess landslide based on distributed environment and effectiveness calculation of physical training,” by Erxia Liu, of the Nanyang Institute of Technology:
The Editor-in-Chief and the Publisher have retracted this article because the content of this article is nonsensical. The peer review process was not carried out in accordance with the Publisher’s peer review policy. The author has not responded to correspondence regarding this retraction.
Then there’s “Neural network–based urban rainfall trend estimation and adolescent anxiety management,” by Mengjiao Liang, of Jiujiang University.
Another, “The characteristics of rainfall in coastal areas and the intelligent library book push system oriented to the Internet of Things,” was purportedly written by Hailing Chi, of the library at the Zibo Vocational Institute in Shandong — which we loosely summarize as: “The rain in Spain falls mainly on my new smart refrigerator.”
And, perhaps our favorite, “Distribution of earthquake activity in mountain area based on embedded system and physical fitness detection of basketball,” which sounds like it might be the poorly-written elevator pitch for a new animated movie in which The Smurfs meet a volatile Shaq.
Click here for a complete list of the papers.
Chris Graf, the research integrity director at Springer Nature, told us:
Fully investigating the unethical practices that we have recently identified in four guest-edited issues is an absolute priority for us. We have completed rapid investigations of 44 individual papers whilst following COPE guidelines, and these papers have been retracted. Investigations into the other papers in these issues are ongoing but we expect to complete them in the near future.
We will not tolerate deliberate attempts to subvert the publication process. As previously stated, we are developing new AI and other-tech based tools and putting additional checks in place to identify and prevent attempts of deliberate manipulation. We are also supporting our Editors in Chief in handling guest-edited issues and increasing publisher oversight to ensure that our policies and best practice are adhered to. Moreover, we are gathering evidence into how these subversions are being carried out to share with other publishers, COPE, relevant institutions and other agencies to help inform the development of industry-wide practices and ensure that culpable parties can be held to account.
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What does the image of shorts mean? That these articles were “pants”, in the UK sense? That they “contain junk”? Inquiring minds demand to know!
Have a look at our original story: http://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/26/guest-editor-says-journal-will-retract-dozens-of-inappropriate-papers-after-his-email-was-hacked/
:-))
Even if the editor’s email was hacked, somebody at the headquarters of Springer Nature should have taken a glance at these sharticles and realized that something was very wrong! Isn’t there any quality control going on?
That would be true if they cared. Which they don’t.
10 papers must be retracted from each one of Editor-in-Chief and respected Reviewers so that next time be more careful when evaluating “rubbish” manuscripts before accepting them.
BTW, how did you get pic of my lovely running short? Not rubbish, so valuable high quality, served me in many running race events. LOL
It’s rich that Springer Nature is developing AI tools to catch papers generated by AI. I guess the idea of having human subject matter experts read submissions is just so old school.
I hope Springer Nature will be transparent how this happened. There’s much that doesn’t make sense in the explanations thus far. For example, how does a OA journal charging $2780 USD let 400 articles get published without paying? Inside knowledge? Or just that some SN journals are lax all the way around?
The AI and human work should not be a dichotomy. The former should help the latter do their work, rather than replace them.
From the publisher’s announcement, it seems that the mentioning of “AI” vaguely refers to something like tools to safeguard the process (including maybe cybersecurity), rather than simply “catching papers generated by AI”. The nonsense papers are only a small part of the story. What appears to have happened looks like a systemic attack on the “supply chain”, so to speak.
“… many of which involve at least some researchers based in China.” These articles appear to be fake in every way, including fake author names, disposable 163.com author email addresses, and some institution names that didn’t come up in my web searches. It’s not even clear that that the articles actually originated from China or were just constructed to look that way.
It’s still fascinating to me that someone pulled this off. This is a case worthy of more research, if SN opens up.
It seems to me that there needs to be an intermediate step between paper acceptance & publishing in these Springer Nature journals: a check by the Editor-in-Chief that the paper actually looks credible. Ok to have fancy-schmancy AI, but that is not enough. Old fashioned ways will still be helpful for this sort of stuff…
There is much, much more scam in that Arabian journal than Springer has retracted or placed under Expressions of Concern.
One and only action from Springer could be meaningful, that is flush-n-drain the journal in its entirety.
They missed on that action.
What we can do is not to let this case be forgotten. Please, remind about it at any convenient chance when speaking or writing about Springer.
Normally, you would have such a step well before the acceptance stage, even before a paper is send out for peer review (assuming there was any peer review at all, which I doubt). The question I mostly am interested in here is how such a special issue came to be at all. That seems where the problem started.
The “International Journal of Computers and Applications” (from Taylor & Francis) seems to have succumbed to a similar problem, with 10 recent retractions – all papers included in a “Special Issue on Advanced Security Techniques for Cloud Computing and Big Data – New Directions”.
E.g. Key technologies of massive concurrent data processing in smart city based on cloud computing.
“Since publication, it came to our attention that the articles published in this Special Issue were not reviewed fully in line with the journal’s peer review standards and policy. We did not find any evidence of misconduct by the authors. However, in order to ensure full assessment has been conducted, we sought expert advice on the validity and quality of the published articles from independent peer reviewers. Following this post publication peer review, the Editor has determined that the articles do not meet the required scholarly standards to remain published in the journal, and therefore has taken the decision to retract. The concerns raised have been shared with the authors and they have been given the opportunity to respond. The authors have been informed about the retraction of the article. We have been informed in our decision-making by our policy on publishing ethics and integrity and the COPE guidelines on retractions.”
It seems to me that, in at least some cases, these mill-minted papers are not much different in terms of gibberish than some of the less blatant papers that in the past have been submitted to known predatory journals as part of a sting operation. As such, why are we not labeling journals that publish this crap as predatory? Those who keep and maintain lists of predatory journals should strongly consider adding lack of competent editorial oversight as a criterion for inclusion in such lists.
AI and hacked emails can’t explain all of this. This has to have been assembled and submitted by a well-informed person(s). The following methods text does not sound like AI prose to me, it sounds like it was written by a person: “Randomly select 30 female college students who are above 160 and below 170, who are well-proportioned, and who like to run, and 15 are selected as the research subjects. …. All subjects …. had good schedules and a cheerful personality.” (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12517-021-07215-y)
This is one of the most fascinating frauds of recent years, way more intriguing than yet another photoshopped western blot. Still begs the question why someone would go to this much effort for no apparent personal gain. Show that peer review at some Springer Nature journals is a house of cards? Science publishing in general? Inside job? Hopefully our anonymous prankster will speak out at some point.
Why no personal gain?
A certain M. Thilagaraj, for example, scooped quite a number of citations from these shmarticles.
On the journal level, there is a considerable number of citations to some hijacked journals run by Indian scammers.
So, there’s a natural guess on the geographical origin of those who engineered this scam. And it’s not China.
Due to this issue SCIE and SCOPUS indexing is removed from this journal. So what happens to those papers which are genuine and published during these years itself in this journal thinking that this had a good indexing. So will those articles also be marked as not SCIE or Scopus indexed? If so, it will be a disappointment for such authors.