Wednesday 16 October 2024

An open letter regarding Scientific Reports

16th October 2024 

to: Mr Chris Graf
Research Integrity Director, Springer Nature and Chair Elect of the World Conference on Research Integrity Foundation Governing Board.

 

Dear Mr Graf,

We are a group of sleuths and forensic meta-scientists who are concerned that Springer Nature is failing in its duty to protect the scientific literature from fraudulent and low quality work. We are aware that, as noted in the 2023 Annual Report, you are committed to maintaining research integrity. We agree with the statement: “To solve the world’s biggest challenges, we all need research that’s reliable, trustworthy and can be built on by scientists and innovators. As a leading global research publisher, we have a pivotal role to play.” It is encouraging to hear that the Springer Nature research integrity group doubled in size in 2023. Nevertheless, we have a growing sense that all is not well concerning the mega journal Scientific Reports.

Some of the work that has been published is so seriously flawed that it is not credible that it underwent any meaningful form of peer review. In other cases, when we have reported flawed papers to the editor or integrity team, the response has been inadequate. A striking example cropped up last week when a “corrected” version of an article was published in Scientific Reports. This article had been flagged up by Guillaume Cabanac as containing numerous “tortured phrases” that are indicative of fraudulent authors attempting to bypass plagiarism checks; the authors were allowed to “correct” the article by merely removing some (not all) of the tortured phrases. This led some of us to look more closely at the article. As is evident from comments on PubPeer, it turned out to be a kind of case study of all the red flags for fraud that we look for. As well as (still uncorrected) tortured phrases, it contained irrelevant content, irrelevant citations, meaningless gibberish, a nonsensical figure, and material recycled from other publications.

This is perhaps the most flagrant example, but we argue that it indicates problems with your editorial processes that are not going to be fixed by AI. The only ways an article like this can have been published are either through editorial negligence or outright malpractice. For it to be negligence would require a remarkable degree of professional incompetence from a handling editor. The possibility of malpractice, would mean there is a corrupt handling editor who bypasses the peer review process entirely or willingly appoints corrupt peer reviewers to approve the manuscript. We appreciate that some papers that we and others have reported have been retracted, but in other cases blatantly fraudulent papers can take years to be retracted or to receive any appropriate editorial action.

We have some specific suggestions for actions that Springer Nature could take to address these issues.

  1. Employ a task force of people with the necessary expertise to carry out an urgent audit of all editors of Scientific Reports. We have looked at the editors on your website, and it is clear that this is an enormous task, given that there are over 13,000 of them, and they are not listed with disambiguating information such as Orcid IDs. Even so, in a few hours, by cross-checking this list against PubPeer, it was possible to identify the 28 cases listed below, covering a range of disciplines, and all, in our view, with pretty clear-cut evidence of problems. Four are members of the Editorial Board. We stress, this is just the low-hanging fruit which was fairly easy to detect.
  2. The list of problematic articles appended below or tabulated on the Problematic Paper Screener might provide an alternative route to identify editors who should never have been given a gatekeeping role in academic publishing. As well as checking the papers we list below, we recommend that all other articles accepted by the same editors should be scrutinised.
  3. Detection of problematic articles and editors could be helped by requiring open peer review for all journals, and ensuring that the name and Orcid ID of the handling editor is included with the published meta-data for all articles.
We hope these suggestions will be helpful in ensuring that research published in Scientific Reports is reliable and trustworthy.

Yours sincerely

Dorothy Bishop
Guillaume Cabanac
François-Xavier Coudert
René Aquarius
Nick Wise
Lonni Besançon
Simon A.J. Kimber
Anna Abalkina
Rickard Carlsson
Samuel J Westwood
Patricia Murray
Nicholas J. L. Brown
Smut Clyde
Leonid Schneider
Ian Hussey
Tu Duong
Gustav Nilsonne
Jamie Cummins
Alexander Magazinov
Elisabeth Bik
Mu Yang
Corrado Viotti
Sholto David


 

Appendices

1. Some examples of editors with concerning PubPeer entries

Editorial board Ghulam Md Ashraf
Editorial board Eun Bo Shim
Editorial board Ajay Goel
Editorial board Rasoul Kowsar

AGEING Vittorio Calabrese
AGRICULTURE Sudip Mitra
ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY Syed Ghulam Musharraf
CELL BIOLOGY Gabriella Dobrowolny
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING Enas Taha Sayed
CIVIL ENGINEERING Manoj Khandelwal
CLINICAL ONCOLOGY Marcello Maggiolini
COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE Praveen Kumar Reddy Maddikunta
DRUG DISCOVERY Salvatore Cuzzocrea
ENDOCRINOLOGY Sihem Boudina
ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING Rama Rao Karri
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE Mayeen Uddin Khandaker
GASTROENTEROLOGY AND HEPATOLOGY Sharon DeMorrow
IMMUNOLOGY Marcin Wysoczynski
INFECTIOUS DISEASES Fatah Kashanchi
MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS Ilyas Khan
MICROBIOLOGY Massimiliano Galdiero
NETWORKS AND COMPLEX SYSTEMS Achyut Shankar
NEUROLOGY Yvan Torrente
RESPIRATORY MEDICINE Soni Savai Pullamsetti
STRUCTURAL AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY Stefania Galdiero
https://pubpeer.com/publications/42901FD2901EC917E3EE54B8DBD749#4 (authors claim a correction is underway, but none published for 2 years)
https://pubpeer.com/publications/01FE09F1127DF0598985987677A101 (part of a list of many flagged papers from this author group. Corrected rather than retracted)
https://pubpeer.com/publications/69EDBAECD50F31B051ECECCD1DF346 (notified on 31-3-2023 about this paper, no action so far)
https://pubpeer.com/publications/F8A1AD2B165888A06C18B28C860E7B. EiC contacted Nov. 22 with authorship concerns, responded that he would investigate. No action taken so far.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/286F83F9553D29F82CD4281309A1E4. Has had EoC for authorship irregularities since July 22, no action taken since.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/5BEDDDA9CF92B9CDDD2AB1AA796271 (blatantly nonsensical paper reported to publisher in June 2024; no action as yet)
https://pubpeer.com/publications/37B87CAC48DE4BC98AD40E00330143 (various corrections since 2022, and in Feb 2023 readers were told “conclusions of this article are being considered by the Editors. A further editorial response will follow the resolution of these issues”. 19 Months later we are still waiting.)


3. Some examples of journal-level reports posted on PubPeer

Scientific Reports

other Springer Nature journals:

Chemosphere
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