Beware ballooning publication rates, says research fraudbuster

Scholarly publishers must become increasingly wary about journals that achieve staggeringly high increases in their publication rates, says the academic sleuth behind hundreds of recent retractions.

The warning from Nick Wise, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, comes after Hindawi announced that it was examining accusations that its journal Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing may have published dozens of bogus papers produced by paper mills.

It follows an investigation by Dr Wise into the journal, the output of which expanded from about 200 papers a year to 2,429 papers in 2022 to date, achieved largely by the creation of special issues on certain topics, most of which published about 200 papers each.

Analysing a special issue on energy emissions from digital devices, Dr Wise found that many of the papers had barely any link to the issue’s main topic, with some papers covering table tennis, childhood literacy and pedagogy.

Many of the papers included spurious references to papers unconnected to the topic discussed, Dr Wise told Times Higher Education. “Five of these papers would reference the same author, even though their paper might have nothing to do with the claims they are making,” he said.

One academic working at a university in Jordan was referenced 139 times across the 62 papers contained in the special issue, added Dr Wise. “The chances that the authors of almost every article would independently decide to cite the same person seems small,” he said.

Further analysis indicated that only four authors from the special issue used emails that matched their institutional affiliation, while 51 used the same little-used email domain names, he added.

“I’m sure these are paper mill products, and they didn’t make much of an effort to hide the fact,” said Dr Wise, whose investigations led IOP Publishing to retract nearly 500 suspicious papers last month, while a further 350 were pulled last year after he raised concerns.

While rapid growth in journal outputs could sometimes be justified if publishers managed the increase carefully, the tenfold increase in publishing rates seen at the Hindawi journal should have triggered concerns, said Dr Wise.

“These huge increases don’t necessarily mean the papers are junk – if you expand things by recruiting more staff and peer reviewers, journals can keep an eye on quality,” he said.

“However, even if everyone is working with the best of intentions, things might not work if you expand at this scale,” Dr Wise added, noting that some journals at other publishers have expanded their output 100-fold, or even 200-fold, over the course of the past four years.

“The problem is that publishers want this kind of growth – they don’t see it as a red flag because it is their business model,” he added.

Hindawi, which was bought by US publisher Wiley in 2021 for a reported $298 million (£265 million) in January 2021, said it was “grateful for the work done by independent research integrity experts, like Dorothy Bishop and Nick Wise, who have helped us expand our investigation” into research fraud, which saw it retract 511 papers last month.

“We are applying what we have learned from the investigation so far, which will enable us to be more proactive in spotting evidence of potential forms of manipulation in published and under review articles,” it added, stating that “these learnings also inform additional screening measures implemented for all content across Hindawi journals, including more stringent verifications of guest editorial teams and multiple checks specifically designed to identify known hallmarks of paper mills and peer review manipulation”.

However, relying on volunteers to highlight research problems to publishers was becoming increasingly untenable, said Dr Wise. “There should be some body or watchdog that looks for research fraud like this because the paper mills are relying on no one looking. There is also no one to compel journals to investigate such matters.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com