Last week this blog focussed on problems affecting Scientific Reports, a mega-journal published by Springer Nature. This week I look at a journal at the opposite end of the spectrum, the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research (JPR), a small, specialist journal which has published just 2187 papers since it was founded in 1971. This is fewer than Scientific Reports publishes in one year. It was brought to my attention by Anna Abalkina because it shows every sign of having been targeted by one or more Eastern European paper mills.
Now, this was really surprising to me. JPR was founded in 1971 by Robert Rieber, whose obituaries in the New York Times and the American Psychologist confirm he had a distinguished career (though both misnamed JPR!). The Advisory and Editorial boards of the journal are peppered with names of famous linguists and psychologists, starting with Noam Chomsky. So there is a sense that if this can happen to JPR, no journal is safe.
Coincidentally, last week Anna and I submitted revisions for a commentary on paper mills coauthored with Pawel Matusz. (You can read the preprint here). Pawel is editor of the journal Mind, Brain & Education (MBE), which experienced an attack by the Tanu.pro paper mill involving papers published in 2022-3. In the commentary, we discussed characteristics of the paper mill, which are rather distinctive and quite different from what is seen in basic biomedical or physical sciences. A striking feature is that the IMRaD structure (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion) is used, but in a clueless fashion, with these headings being inserted in what is otherwise a rambling and discursive piece of text, that typically has little or no empirical content. Insofar as there are any methods described, they don't occur in the methods section, and they are too vague for the research to be replicable.
Reading these papers rapidly turns my brain to mush, but in the interest of public service I did wade through five of them and left comments on Pubpeer:Yeleussizkyzy, M., Zhiyenbayeva, N., Ushatikova, I. et al. E-Learning and Flipped Classroom in Inclusive Education: The Case of Students with the Psychopathology of Language and Cognition. J Psycholinguist Res 52, 2721–2742 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-023-10015-ySnezhko, Z., Yersultanova, G., Spichak, V. et al. Effects of Bilingualism on Students’ Linguistic Education: Specifics of Teaching Phonetics and Lexicology. J Psycholinguist Res 52, 2693–2720 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-023-10016-x
Nurakenova, A., Nagymzhanova, K. A Study of Psychological Features Related to Creative Thinking Styles of University Students. J Psycholinguist Res 53, 1 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-024-10042-3
Auganbayeva, M., Turguntayeva, G., Anafinova, M. et al.Linguacultural and Cognitive Peculiarities of Linguistic Universals. J Psycholinguist Res 53, 3 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-024-10050-3
Shalkarbek, A., Kalybayeva, K., Shaharman, G. et al. Cognitive Linguistic Analysis of Hyperbole-based Phraseological Expressions in Kazakh and English Languages. J Psycholinguist Res 53, 4 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-024-10052-1
My experience with the current batch of papers suggests that a relatively quick way of screening a submitted paper would be to look at the Methods section. This should contain an account of methods that would indicate what was done and how, at a level of detail sufficient for others to replicate the work. Obviously, this is not appropriate for theoretical papers, but for those purporting to report empirical work, it would work well, at least for the papers I looked at in JPR.
All of these papers have authors from Kazakhstan, sometimes with co-authors from the Russian Federation. This led me to look at the geographic distribution of authors in the journal over time. The top countries represented by JPR authors in 2020 onwards are China (113), United States (68), Iran (52), Germany (28), Saudi Arabia (22) and Kazakhstan (19). However, these composite numbers mask striking trends. All the Kazakhstan authored papers are in 2023-2024. There's also a notable fall-off in papers authored by USA-based authors in the same time period, with only 11 cases in total. This is quite remarkable for a journal that had a striking USA dominance in authors up until around 2015, as shown in the attached figure (screenshot from Dimensions.ai).
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| Number of papers in JPR from five top countries: 2005-2024 |
Exported: October 20, 2024 Criteria: Source Title is Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. © 2024 Digital Science and Research Solutions Inc. All rights reserved. Non-commercial redistribution / external re-use of this work is permitted subject to appropriate acknowledgement. This work is sourced from Dimensions® at www.dimensions.ai. |
Whenever a paper mill infestation is discovered, it raises the question of how it happened. Surely the whole purpose of peer review is to prevent low quality or fraudulent material entering the literature? In other journals where this has happened it has been found that the peer review process was compromised, with fake peer reviewers being used. Even so, one would have hoped that an editor would scrutinize papers and realise something was amiss. As mentioned in the previous blogpost, it would be much easier to track down the ways in which fraudulent papers get into mainstream journals if the journal reported information about the editor who handled the paper, and published open peer review.
Whatever the explanation, it is saddening to see a fine journal brought so low. In 2021, at the 50th anniversary of the founding of the journal, the current editor, Rafael Art. Javier, wrote a tribute to his predecessor, Robert Rieber:"His expectation, as stated in that first issue, was that manuscripts accepted 'must add to knowledge in some way, whether they are in the form of experimental reports, review papers, or theoretical papers...and studies with negative results,' provided that they are of sufficiently high quality to make an original contribution."
Let us hope that the scourge of paper mills can be banished from the journal to allow it to be restored to the status it once had, and for Robert Rieber's words to once more be applicable.
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