Springer retracting 107 papers published in Tumor Biology with fake peer reviews
retractionwatch.com
retractionwatch.com
For those unfamiliar with the practice, this is common, and seems to becoming more standard at many journals, even (especially?) very reputable ones.
I almost always ignore the reviewer's requests for particular authors, because it always seems to involve a conflict of interest. I am sensitive to requests for a particular author not to review a paper, because of vindictiveness in academics, but requesting reviewers is a different story.
I've seen significant changes in this practice over time. Originally it seemed unusual, almost an option of last resort to cue the editor to bitter feuds or to help identify reviewers in areas that involve highly idiosyncratic issues. At a lot of journals this is still the case. Over time, though, it's seemed to turn into something different, a stopgap measure for overburdened, unconscientious, or harried editors to find increasingly scarce reviewers.
A lot of attention has been paid to the pressures on researchers to publish or perish, quality be damned, and how that affects science. The flip side of that coin, though, is changes in editorial practices at many journals, which have become very cursory, rubber-stamping affairs. Turnaround time on papers is very quick at many journals, which gives authors quick feedback, but at the same time (not necessarily as a result) the review process has become shoddy. Editors are often unfamiliar with the subject material and don't take time to learn it, will grasp at reviewers who might be unqualified or have conflicts of interest, and treat reviews very superficially, even though studies have shown that they are horribly unreliable. To be fair, even finding reviewers can be difficult: I've had conversations with colleagues who have been told not to review because it doesn't bring in revenue to the department. Everyone wants to publish, but not everyone wants to review.
Things are broken in science at the moment, at least in academics. Publishing through peer review has become extremely overvalued. I think it will maintain its place for certain reasons, but some change in mindset or culture around it is necessary.
Otherwise my only explanation would be that the editors simply didn't care at all.
Finding contact information for certain individuals is more difficult than it might seem initially, though. Especially if someone has left the academic setting per se: a common pattern is for people to leave and go to a business or hospital setting, where real contact information can be guarded heavily. You might see that so-and-so works at such-and-such place (maybe), but not be able to find a working contact address, and might not even see a reasonable way to figure it out.
You're right that using the author-supplied contact info of a potential reviewer is doubly problematic and probably shouldn't be done. However, at some level I can understand why that happens, because the process often devolves into some chain of contacts to get a working email address anyway.
I'm a founder. Very interested in your feedback on what we need to be doing.
If you require people with twelve real superpowers in your job offer, you will end hiring a liar in tighs.
I wonder if any of these papers has definitely convinced a decision-maker to pursue or avoid a particular course of treatment. IE, has someone literally died because of this?
It seems likely, but these papers are only a year or two old.
In any case, this kind of happening is why it's difficult anymore to see "peer review" as being tantamount to a verification that a conclusion was reached via rigorous science.
Moreover, it's what makes many people who do care about science wonder if "modern medicine" is really first-and-foremost science-based any more. There seems to be an awful lot of armchair BS making it through this process.
The formal peer review during publication is a very coarse filter, and not well suited to catch outright fraud. It's more of a quick sanity check than an in depth examination. The real verification happens once other scientists build on that paper and perform new experiments.
As China tries to take its seat at the top table of global academia, the criminal underworld has seized on a feature in its research system: the fact that research grants and promotions are awarded on the basis of the number of articles published, not on the quality of the original research.
To be clear, there are plenty of high quality Chinese academics writing high quality papers, and I read somewhere that the Chinese government is well aware of the problem with fake journals and trying to address it, but it looks like the Chinese scientific community has even bigger problems of perverse incentives than elsewhere in the world.
The authors committing review fraud probably are not trying to publish fabricated research; it's more likely they were attempting to make it more likely that their research is published.
Most articles are not rejected by reviewers because the research is "wrong"; rather because they are not significant enough, or other papers are better.
It seems that part of the publishing apparatus discovered this flaw as the journal was undergoing a shift in publication models. In that all parties have an interest in the ongoing viability and prestige of the journal, and most often institutions respond to scandals by either coverup or diminishment, who benefits from the news and which party wants to contain the scandal to the review process only?
Grandparent has it right. This is all about the pressure on authors to publish, and publish quickly.
A sociopath looks like the Sames-Sezen affair: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2011/07/08/the...
Even there a certain blogger said that he knew "Dali Sames not to be a nice person", whoever went there knew exactly what he was getting into.
It's an important metric, of course they'd list it.
Theranos ring a bell?
https://academic.oup.com/nar/pages/Ms_Prep_Submission#charge...
Sometimes this is under the guise of "open access" or other charges... there is often a waver if the author can not afford the fee (which you have to apply for).
I am positive that hundreds of studies were conducted and "peer reviewed" to ensure that they were safe. And I am sure that the drug companies producing vaccines have 0 conflict of interest with the anti "fake-news" saying that "anti-vaxxers" are nuts. /s
If you're concerned about the incentives of vaccine manufacturers to produce safe products (which is a reasonable position), I think a better response in this case is to call for more transparency in research and manufacturing.
Why accept a known large risk in an attempt to reduce a risk that may not exist at all?
Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or proclaim that you expect to get downvoted.
but stuff like this makes me question things like vaccinating children.