An analysis of PubPeer comments on highly-cited retracted articles

PubPeer is sometimes discussed as if it is some kind of cesspit where people smear honest scientists with specious allegations of fraud. I'm always taken aback when I hear this, since it is totally at odds with my experience. When I conducted an analysis of PubPeer comments concerning papers from UK universities published over a two-year period, I found that all 345 of them conformed to PubPeer's guidelines, which require comments to contain only "Facts, logic and publicly verifiable information". There were examples where another commenter, sometimes an author, rebutted a comment convincingly. In other cases, the discussion concerned highly technical aspects of research, where even experts may disagree. Clearly, PubPeer comments are not infallible evidence of problems, but in my experience, they are strictly moderated and often draw attention to serious errors in published work.

The Problematic Paper Screener (PPS) is a beautiful resource that is ideal to investigate PubPeer's impact. It not only collates information on articles that are annulled (an umbrella term coined to encompass retractions, removals, or withdrawals), but it also cross-references this information with PubPeer, so you can see which articles have comments. Furthermore, it provides the citation count of each article, based on Dimensions.  

The PPS lists over 134,000 annulled papers; I wanted to see what proportion of retractions/withdrawals were preceded by a PubPeer comment. To make the task tractable, I focused on articles that had at least 100 citations, and which were annulled between 2021 and 2025. This gave a total of 800 articles, covering all scientific disciplines. It was necessary to read the PubPeer comments for each of these, because many comments occur after retraction, and serve solely to record the retraction on PubPeer. Accordingly, I coded each paper in terms of whether the first PubPeer comment preceded or followed the annulment.  

Flowchart of analysis of PPS annulled papers

 

I had anticipated that around 10-20% of these annulled articles would have associated PubPeer comments; this proved to be a considerable underestimate. In fact, 58% of highly-cited papers that were annulled between 2021-2025 had prior PubPeer comments. Funnily enough, shortly after I'd started this analysis, I saw this comment on Slack by Achal Agrawal: "I was wondering if there is any study on what percentage of retractions happen thanks to sleuths. I have a feeling that at least around 50% of the retractions happen thanks to the work of 10 sleuths." Achal's estimate of the percentage of flagged papers was much closer than mine. But what about the number of sleuths who were responsible?

It's not possible to give more than a rough estimate of the contribution of individual commenters. Many of them use pseudonyms (some people even use a different pseudonym for each post they submit), and combinations of individuals often contributed comments on a single article. Some of the PubPeer comments had been submitted in early years, when they were just labelled as "Unregistered submission" or "Peer 1" etc., so any estimate will be imperfect. The best I could do was to focus just on the first comment for each article, excluding any comments occurring after a retraction. Of those who had stable names or pseudonyms, the 10 most prolific commenters had commented on between 9 and 50 articles, accounting for 27% of all retractions in this sample. Although this is a lower proportion than Achal's estimate, it's an impressive number, especially when you bear in mind that there were many comments from unknown contributors, and the analysis focused only on articles with at least 100 citations.

Of course, the naysayers may reply and say that this just goes to show that the sleuths who comment on articles are effective in causing retractions, not that they are accurate. To that I can only reply that publishers/journals are very reluctant to retract articles: they may regard it as reputationally damaging, and be concerned about litigation from disgruntled authors. In addition, they have to go through due process and it takes up a lot of resources to make the necessary checks and modify the publication record. They don't do it lightly, and often don't do it at all, despite clear evidence of serious error in an article (see, e.g.  Grey et al, 2025). 

If an article is going to be retracted, it is better that it is done sooner rather than later. Monitoring PubPeer would be a good way of cleaning up a polluted literature - in the interests of all of us. Any publisher can do that for free: just ask an employee of the integrity department to check new PubPeer posts every day—about 40 minutes and you’re done. PubPeer also provides publishers with a convenient dashboard to facilitate this essential monitoring task.

It would be interesting to extend the analysis to less highly-cited papers, but this would be a huge exercise, particularly since this would include many paper-milled articles from mass retractions. I hope that my selective analysis will at least demonstrate that those who comment on problematic articles on PubPeer should be taken seriously. 

 

Post-script: 7 February 2026

One of the commentators with numbered comments below has complained that I am censoring criticism, and has revealed their identity on LinkedIn as Ryan James Jessup, JD/MPA.  My bad - I usually paste a statement at the end of a blogpost explaining that Comments are moderated so there can be a delay, but I accept nonanonymous comments that are polite and on topic.  Jessup didn't take up my offer of incorporating his arguments in a section at the end of the blog, so I have accepted them and you can read them in the Comments.

I actually agree with a lot of what he says, but some points I disagree with, so here are my thoughts.

Points 1-2. He starts by stating the piece confuses correlation with causation.  On reflection I think he's right. The word "role" in the title is misleading, and I have accordingly changed the title of the post from "The role of PubPeer in retractions of highly-cited articles" to "An analysis of PubPeer comments on highly-cited articles".

3.  He argues that selection of highly-cited papers was done to fudge the result because these papers are most likely to be noticed and commented on.  The  actual reason for selecting these papers was to focus on outputs that had had some influence; many people assume PubPeer commentators just focus on the low-hanging fruit from papermills, which nobody is going to read anyhow. There is nothing to stop Jessup or anyone else doing his own analysis using another filter to see if these results generalise to less highly-cited articles. It involves just a few hours of rather tedious coding. Maybe sample a random 800 articles?  

4. He argues that "annulled" papers covers various categories.  I am glad to be able to clarify that in the sample of 800 papers that I analysed, all were retractions.

5. He disagrees that my opinion of whether PubPeer comments were factual and accurate has any value, and that they could be defamatory or otherwise falsely imply misconduct.  From my experience, I reckon it would be difficult to get such material past PubPeer moderators, but if he can provide some examples, that would be helpful.  

6. He says the coding method is subjective "They read comments and decide whether the first comment preceded or followed annulment".  The dates are provided for the retraction notice in the PPS, so this is just a matter of checking if the PubPeer comment (also dated) appeared before or after that date.

7. Re the identification of "top 10 sleuths".  I noted the limitations inherent in the data, so I am not sure what Jessup is complaining of here. The fact remains that a small number of individuals have been very effective in identifying issues in highly-cited articles prior to their retraction.

8.  Jessup argues that I'm saying that “journals don’t retract lightly, therefore PubPeer must be right”.  The first part of that argument has ample evidence. If he is aware of cases where PubPeer comments have indeed led to inappropriate retractions, then he should name them.

9-11. I do actually have some understanding of how retraction processes work in journals, but my concern is the failure of many journals/publishers to initiate the first step in the process.  I think we're in agreement that the current system for retracting articles from journals is broken. We also agree that PubPeer comments should be regarded as tips. My suggestion is simply that if publishers have a useful free source of tips, they should use it. A few of them do, but many don't seem motivated to be proactive because it just creates more work.

The prolific PubPeer commenters that I know would love it if the platform could be used primarily for civilised academic debate, as was the original intention. Unfortunately, science can't wait until the broken system is repaired; we do need to clean up a polluted literature. I would add that the idea that those who comment on PubPeer are doing it for the glory is laughable. The main reaction is to be ignored at best and abused at worst. They are unusual people who are obsessive about the need to have a reliable scientific literature.

 

 

 

 

Defence against the dark arts: a proposal for a new MSc course

 

Since I retired, an increasing amount of my time has been taken up with investigating scientific fraud. In recent months, I've become convinced of two things: first, fraud is a far more serious problem than most scientists recognise, and second, we cannot continue to leave the task of tackling it to volunteer sleuths. 

If you ask a typical scientist about fraud, they will usually tell you it is extremely rare, and that it would be a mistake to damage confidence in science because of the activities of a few unprincipled individuals. Asked to name fraudsters they may, depending on their age and discipline, mention Paolo Macchiarini, John Darsee, Elizabeth Holmes or Diederik Stapel, all high profile, successful individuals, who were brought down when unambiguous evidence of fraud was uncovered. Fraud has been around for years, as documented in an excellent book by Horace Judson (2004), and yet, we are reassured, science is self-correcting, and has prospered despite the activities of the occasional "bad apple". The problem with this argument is that, on the one hand, we only know about the fraudsters who get caught, and on the other hand, science is not prospering particularly well - numerous published papers produce results that fail to replicate and major discoveries are few and far between (Harris, 2017). We are swamped with scientific publications, but it is increasingly hard to distinguish the signal from the noise. In my view, it is getting to the point where in many fields it is impossible to build a cumulative science, because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it's getting worse and worse.

My gloomy prognosis is partly engendered by a consideration of a very different kind of fraud: the academic paper mill. In contrast to the lone fraudulent scientist who fakes data to achieve career advancement, the paper mill is an industrial-scale operation, where vast numbers of fraudulent papers are generated, and placed in peer-reviewed journals with authorship slots being sold to willing customers. This process is facilitated in some cases by publishers who encourage special issues, which are then taken over by "guest editors" who work for a paper mill. Some paper mill products are very hard to detect: they may be created from a convincing template with just a few details altered to make the article original. Others are incoherent nonsense, with spectacularly strange prose emerging when "tortured phrases" are inserted to evade plagiarism detectors.

You may wonder whether it matters if a proportion of the published literature is nonsense: surely any credible scientist will just ignore such material? Unfortunately, it's not so simple. First, it is likely that the paper mill products that are detected are just the tip of the iceberg - a clever fraudster will modify their methods to evade detection. Second, many fields of science attempt to synthesise findings using big data approaches, automatically combing the literature for studies with specific keywords and then creating databases, e.g. of genotypes and phenotypes. If these contain a large proportion of fictional findings, then attempts to use these databases to generate new knowledge will be frustrated. Similarly, in clinical areas, there is growing concern that systematic reviews that are supposed to synthesise evidence to get at the truth instead lead to confusion because a high proportion of studies are fraudulent. A third and more indirect negative consequence of the explosion in published fraud is that those who have committed fraud can rise to positions of influence and eminence on the back of their misdeeds. They may become editors, with the power to publish further fraudulent papers in return for money, and if promoted to professorships they will train a whole new generation of fraudsters, while being careful to sideline any honest young scientists who want to do things properly. I fear in some institutions this has already happened.

To date, the response of the scientific establishment has been wholly inadequate. There is little attempt to proactively check for fraud: science is still regarded as a gentlemanly pursuit where we should assume everyone has honourable intentions. Even when evidence of misconduct is strong, it can take months or years for a paper to be retracted. As whistleblower Raphaël Levy asked on his blog: Is it somebody else's problem to correct the scientific literature? There is dawning awareness that our methods for hiring and promotion might encourage misconduct, but getting institutions to change is a very slow business, not least because those in positions of power succeeded in the current system, and so think it must be optimal.

The task of unmasking fraud is largely left to hobbyists and volunteers, a self-styled army of "data sleuths", who are mostly motivated by anger at seeing science corrupted and the bad guys getting away with it. They have developed expertise in spotting certain kinds of fraud, such as image manipulation and improbable patterns in data, and they have also uncovered webs of bad actors who have infiltrated many corners of science. One might imagine that the scientific establishment would be grateful that someone is doing this work, but the usual response to a sleuth who finds evidence of malpractice is to ignore them, brush the evidence under the carpet, or accuse them of vexatious behaviour. Publishers and academic institutions are both at fault in this regard.

If I'm right, this relaxed attitude to the fraud epidemic is a disaster-in-waiting. There are a number of things that need to be done urgently. One is to change research culture so that rewards go to those whose work is characterised by openness and integrity, rather than those who get large grants and flashy publications. Another is for publishers to act far more promptly to investigate complaints of malpractice and issue retractions where appropriate. Both of these things are beginning to happen, slowly. But there is a third measure that I think should be taken as soon as possible, and that is to train a generation of researchers in fraud busting. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the data sleuths, but the scale of the problem is such that we need the equivalent of a police force rather than a volunteer band. Here are some of the topics that an MSc course could cover:

• How to spot dodgy datasets
• How to spot manipulated figures
• Textual characteristics of fraudulent articles
• Checking scientific credentials
• Checking publisher credentials/identifying predatory publishers
  
• How to raise a complaint when fraud is suspected
• How to protect yourself from legal attacks
• Cognitive processes that lead individuals to commit fraud
• Institutional practices that create perverse incentives
• The other side of the coin: "Merchants of doubt" whose goal is to discredit science

I'm sure there's much more that could be added and would be glad of suggestions. 

Now, of course, the question is what could you do with such a qualification. If my predictions are right, then individuals with such expertise will increasingly be in demand in academic institutions and publishing houses, to help ensure the integrity of work they produce and publish. I also hope that there will be growing recognition of the need for more formal structures to be set up to investigate scientific fraud and take action when it is discovered: graduates of such a course would be exactly the kind of employees needed in such an organisation.

It might be argued that this is a hopeless endeavour. In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Rowling, 2005) Professor Snape tells his pupils:

 "The Dark Arts, are many, varied, ever-changing, and eternal. Fighting them is like fighting a many-headed monster, which, each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer than before. You are fighting that which is unfixed, mutating, indestructible."

This is a pretty accurate description of what is involved in tackling scientific fraud. But Snape does not therefore conclude that action is pointless. On the contrary, he says: 

"Your defences must therefore be as flexible and inventive as the arts you seek to undo."

I would argue that any university that wants to be ahead of the field in this enterprise could should flexibility and inventiveness in starting up a postgraduate course to train the next generation of fraud-busting wizards. 

Bibliography

Bishop, D. V. M. (2023). Red flags for papermills need to go beyond the level of individual articles: A case study of Hindawi special issues. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/6mbgv

Boughton, S. L., Wilkinson, J., & Bero, L. (2021). When beauty is but skin deep: Dealing with problematic studies in systematic reviews | Cochrane Library. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 5. Retrieved 4 June 2021, from https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.ED000152/full

 Byrne, J. A., & Christopher, J. (2020). Digital magic, or the dark arts of the 21st century—How can journals and peer reviewers detect manuscripts and publications from paper mills? FEBS Letters, 594(4), 583–589. https://doi.org/10.1002/1873-3468.13747

Cabanac, G., Labbé, C., & Magazinov, A. (2021). Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals (arXiv:2107.06751). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2107.06751

Carreyrou, J. (2019). Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. Pan Macmillan.

COPE & STM. (2022). Paper mills: Research report from COPE & STM. Committee on Publication Ethics and STM. https://doi.org/10.24318/jtbG8IHL 

Culliton, B. J. (1983). Coping with fraud: The Darsee Case. Science (New York, N.Y.), 220(4592), 31–35. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.6828878 

Grey, S., & Bolland, M. (2022, August 18). Guest Post—Who Cares About Publication Integrity? The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2022/08/18/guest-post-who-cares-about-publication-integrity/ 

Hanson, M., Gómez Barreiro, P., Crosetto, P., & Brockington, D. (2023). The strain on scientific publishing (2309; p. 33343265 Bytes). arXiv. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2309/2309.15884.pdf 

Harris, R. (2017). Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions (1st edition). Basic Books.

Judson, H. F. (2004). The Great Betrayal. Orlando.

Lévy, R. (2022, December 15). Is it somebody else’s problem to correct the scientific literature? Rapha-z-Lab. https://raphazlab.wordpress.com/2022/12/15/is-it-somebody-elses-problem-to-correct-the-scientific-literature/

 Moher, D., Bouter, L., Kleinert, S., Glasziou, P., Sham, M. H., Barbour, V., Coriat, A.-M., Foeger, N., & Dirnagl, U. (2020). The Hong Kong Principles for assessing researchers: Fostering research integrity. PLOS Biology, 18(7), e3000737. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000737

 Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2010). Merchants of Doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. Bloomsbury Press.

 Paterlini, M. (2023). Paolo Macchiarini: Disgraced surgeon is sentenced to 30 months in prison. BMJ, 381, p1442. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p1442  

Rowling, J. K. (2005) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Bloomsbury, London. ‎ ISBN: 9780747581086

Smith, R. (2021, July 5). Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise? The BMJ. https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-health-research-is-fraudulent-until-proved-otherwise/

Stapel, D. (2016). Faking science: A true story of academic fraud.  Translated by Nicholas J. Brown. http:// nick.brown.free.fr/stapel.

Stroebe, W., Postmes, T., & Spears, R. (2012). Scientific misconduct and the myth of self-correction in science. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(6), 670–688. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612460687

 

Note: On-topic comments are welcome but are moderated to avoid spam, so there may be a delay before they appear.

Is Hindawi “well-positioned for revitalization?”

Guest post by Huanzi Zhang*

 Screenshot from https://www.wiley.com/en-us/network/publishing/research-publishing/open-access/wiley-acquires-hindawi-qa-with-liz-ferguson

 

Over the past year, special issues of dozens of Hindawi journals have been exposed as being systematically manipulated, resulting in the delisting of more than 20 Hindawi journals from major journal databases, as well as the retraction of more than 2,700 papers by the publisher. This "unexpected event" at Hindawi also led to a slump in profits for the parent company, John Wiley & Sons. However, in a recent statement, the president, CEO & director of Wiley, Brian Napack, stated that Hindawi was now ready for revitalization and reinstatement of the special issue program. In my opinion, Wiley has not dealt adequately with the integrity issues that led to the problem, but appears focused on growth  through the medium of special issues. This raises questions as to whether Hindawi’s operation is sustainable in the long term. 

Napack’s statement can be read here. He stated:

 “Fiscal '24 (starts on May 1, 2023) will be a year of revitalization for Hindawi with positive signs already emerging. We've now named a new leader of Hindawi, a talented Wiley veteran with deep expertise in the area. We've restarted the special issues program and we will be ramping it up throughout the year. We're working through the large article backlog, and we are executing our journal growth plans.”

One might, however, be forgiven for being a bit sceptical about this upbeat message, since just a year before, Napack said:

 “Hindawi performed at a very high level this year, delivering strong double-digit organic revenue growth and 36% article output growth on a pro forma basis, and has achieved this with exceptional margins. We have now completed the integration and we are benefiting significantly from Hindawi's industry leading open publishing practices and its highly efficient systems.” 

So what is the problem with Hindawi journals that suddenly got Wiley into trouble? Is Hindawi really well-positioned for revitalization? 

Wiley’s acquisition of Hindawi

Wiley announced the acquisition of Hindawi on January 5, 2021. The person who pushed Wiley to buy Hindawi was Judy Verses, Wiley's Executive Vice President, who left Wiley to join Elsevier a few months after the acquisition was completed. On January 11, 2021, in an interview with Verses and Wiley's Senior Vice President Liz Ferguson, we learned that Wiley expected that Hindawi journals would publish many articles by Chinese authors, expanding their market in China:

 “It has surpassed the US in recent years, and in an increasing number of disciplines is undoubtedly the global leader. Hindawi had the foresight to launch and develop journals that reflect strengths in the China research space. Similar to Wiley, Hindawi identified early on how important it was to serve the needs of China-based researchers. Bringing together our two teams now means we have an even stronger position to be able to work to the needs of those researchers.”

The Publishing Perspective's interview with Jay Flynn, Senior Vice President and Chief Product Offer of Wiley Research, published on January 5, 2021, and Wiley's internal interview with Ferguson, published on February 23, 2021, mentioned the importance of China. The new niche market for Hindawi journals seemed to respond soundly to this appointment, and the number of submissions began to increase significantly (Figure 1), while no such increase had been seen in the preceding months.  In September 2021, Jay Flynn was promoted to Executive Vice President of Wiley Research to replace Judy Verses.

 

Figure 1. Number of submissions received per month for 24 journals that subsequently had papers retracted by Hindawi. Data from Hindawi Journal Report.

The papermill problem 

The first concerns were raised by research integrity communities and individuals, who since 2021 posted thousands of comments on the PubPeer journal club relating to papers published in hundreds of special issues of Hindawi journals. Many comments were made by anonymous sleuths Rhipidura albiventris, Hoya camphorifolia and Parashorea tomentella, whose contributions sometimes exceeded 100 per day.  Problems were not limited to individual special issues or even individual journals. There appeared to be systematic manipulation of the publishing process, especially affecting special issues, indicating activities of so-called “paper mills” – fraudulent organisations that will sell authorship and/or citations of papers, often faked, for a fee. Leonid Schneider, who runs the blog For Better Science, assisted David Bimler and others in posting their findings from Hindawi journals. Nick Wise discussed “What is going on in Hindawi special issues?” on October 12, 2022. These sleuths noted that many supposedly ‘peer-reviewed’ manuscripts had incoherent or unintelligible content, and corresponding authors used email addresses from other institutions; furthermore, a large number of papers cited irrelevant references, presumably to boost citation counts; some paper mills used the article processing charge (APC) waiver policy of Hindawi to make more profit. The pattern of abnormal citations confirmed that the fraud was not bounded by journals, and so publication-based investigations made it difficult to expose specific paper mills. 

It soon became clear that the special issues that were such a lucrative source of income for Hindawi were wide open to corrupt "guest editors" who, once appointed, could use fake peer review and flood the journal with fraudulent papers and irrelevant citations. In the gold open access model, Wiley earns APCs for every article published in Hindawi journals, whether in a special issue or not, so their incentive to exert quality control is compromised. Some examples are so extreme that nobody could take them seriously, such as an article on the ideological and political education of the Chinese Communist Party in a special issue "Exploration of Human Cognition using Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare", which was submitted, peer-reviewed and received on the same day. There are thousands of other papers which may be genuine but whose subject falls well outside the scope of the special issue where they are published, indicating that the journal is out of editorial control. 

Many of the authors and guest editors of the problematic papers mentioned by Bimler came from Asia. Ruihang Huang, Chunjiong Zhang, and Hanlie Cheng, PhD students at Donghua University, Tongji University and China University of Geosciences, Beijing, respectively, were beneficiaries of the citation manipulation and participants in the manipulation of special issues. Another example is Kaifa Zhao, who approved many nonsense manuscripts for publication as a guest editor at two journals: Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience and Journal of Environmental and Public Health. TigerBB8 identified Zhao as a PhD student at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Dorothy Bishop requested an investigation by the university. As reported in Retraction Watch, their report claimed that Zhao's identity had been stolen by Yizhang Jiang, Zhao's master's program advisor. 

"According to Mr Zhao, he was not aware of relevant emails from Hindawi and has never responded to emails that are related to the two special issues"

 Hindawi takes action (slowly)

After a year of rapid growth in the Chinese market (Figure 2), Wiley acted. On September 28, 2022, Ferguson announced that 511 papers would be retracted from Hindawi journals. Intrestingly, no mention was made of the comments on PubPeer and Bimler's blog post; instead it was stated that these retractions were based on the findings of the Hindawi Research Integrity Team. The first retractions were seen in mid-November with concentrated releases during the Lunar New Year.

 

Figure 2. Number of articles and reviews published in 14 Hindawi journals 2019-2022. Data from Scopus.

It is possible that mass retractions were delayed because Wiley did not want to disrupt their agenda at the 74th Frankfurter Buchmesse (October 19 to 23, 2022). There was no indication that Wiley shared Hindawi's problems at the book fair. Instead, they were busy with other things. Flynn announced the creation of Wiley Partners Solution to meet the "scholarly publishing needs at scale" on October 17. Ferguson participated in a forum entitled "How the Article-Based Economy is Transforming Research Publishing" on October 19. Intriguingly, an essay posted by Chemistry World on April 24, 2023, citing Flynn, noted that Wiley had convened a meeting of publishers at that book fair, invited Clarivate, the owner of major journal database Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection, and disclosed to them the problems with Hindawi journals. We do not know the outcome of this meeting, but change did occur. On the one hand, Hindawi began issuing retractions on November 16, 2022. Nevertheless, in October 2022, special issues of Hindawi journals were still being published with many compromised articles, though from December 2022 onwards, the number of papers published in special issues decreased.  

Delisting of Hindawi journals

The public information prompted journal databases to re-evaluate whether Hindawi journals should continue to be indexed. In February 2023, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) delisted thirteen Hindawi journals. Then Scopus discontinued the indexing of six Hindawi journals. On March 20, 2023, Clarivate delisted nineteen Hindawi journals from WoS Core Collection. The fact that Education Research International was delisted suggested Clarivate conducted an independent investigation, as this journal had not been mentioned in relevant sources.  

As shown in Figure 3, the actions of the publisher and journal databases did not always involve the same journals. 

Figure 3. Twenty-six problematic Hindawi journals. WoS Core Collection: The journal was delisted from WoS Core Collection in March 2023. DOAJ: The journal was delisted from DOAJ in February 2023. Scopus: The journal was delisted from Scopus in the first half of 2023. Ferguson 500+: Papers in the journal were retracted and Liz Ferguson's statement was cited in the retraction statement. Flynn 2200+: Papers in the journal were retracted by Wiley using similar statements after May 2023. 

Clarivate did not publish the reasons for the delisting of each journal, nor did they delist more Hindawi journals before the release of 2023 Journal Citation Reports on June 28, 2023. Compared to MDPI, whose mega-journal the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health was delisted, Wiley's public response was subdued. In a mildly worded statement on March 22, 2023, on their WeChat Official Account, Hindawi said they were "disappointed" that their journals were delisted by Clarivate but did not offer any defence. In another post on April 5, 2023, Hindawi stated they would not appeal the delisting and suggested that the authors submit their manuscripts to Wiley journals. A guest post by Flynn in the Scholarly Kitchen on April 4, 2023, mentioned that:

 “At Wiley we take full responsibility for the quality of the content we publish across our portfolio.” 

He also announced a further 1,200 retractions to be issued by Hindawi journals. Flynn disclosed to Chemistry World how they selected which publications to retract, specifically that he deployed 200 people from his editorial staff to conduct "a manual review of every single paper that we thought may have been compromised'".

Impact on authors

Many authors published in Hindawi journals because they had the cachet of being listed in scholarly databases. One author of an article published in February 2023 in Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity distributed email templates she drafted to others via an instant messaging software, encouraging them to ask Hindawi to work with Clarivate to index papers with publication dates before March 19, 2023. Anonymous sources described the chaos of Hindawi's customer service in late March 2023. Many people complained that Hindawi never responded to their emails. On the other hand, one author received a response from Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity (omcl@hindawi.com), even though his complaint was about an article in another journal. Some authors of accepted manuscripts complained that Hindawi delayed their requests to withdraw their submissions, and feared that manuscripts would be accidentally published. 

Other authors turned on the sleuths who had exposed paper mill activity on PubPeer, describing their activities as "social media-related PubPeer extortion". Jincheng Wang from the Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, who had published in a compromised special issue, suggested that the intent of those who posted comments was to blackmail the authors, under the threat of translating publicly available comments into Chinese and then posting them on social media in China. He encouraged authors to report these comments to the moderators.

Impact of delisting on Hindawi’s business 

Wiley did not inform investors about the retractions in Hindawi journals in their 2nd quarter report (August 1 to October 31, 2022) published on December 7, 2022. In the 3rd quarter report (November 1, 2022, to January 31, 2023) on March 9, 2023, Napack confronted the issue head-on: 

“Upon discovery, the Wiley team responded quickly, suspending the Hindawi special issues program and fixing the source of the problem by purging the external bad actors and by implementing measures to prevent this from happening again. To date, these actions include increasing editorial controls and introducing new AI-based screening tools into the editorial process. We've also been scrubbing the archive and publicly retracting any compromised articles.”

 And, 

“We put the fixes in place. We feel very good about what we've done. We are reopening the programs. And we are moving forward to clear the backlog and drive forward with our publishing program.” 

However, the statistics on publications showed that publications in special issues continued through November 2022 to January 2023. Despite the claim that the problem had been resolved, more than 200 articles published in special issues of 34 Hindawi journals in 2023 received comments on PubPeer relating to concerns about the publishing process. The release of retraction statements was also delayed. As of July 20, 2023,  retraction statements were issued on six dates, on May 24, June 21, June 28, June 29, July 12, and July 19, with 112, 559, 514, 1, 521, and 510 retractions, respectively. The total number of retracted papers, approximately 2700 including the initial 500 from 2022, substantially exceeds the 1200 mentioned by Flynn. 

An interesting development has been the involvement of law firms who specialize in shareholder rights litigation, such as Rosen Law Firm, Kirby McInerney LLP, Schall Law Firm, Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP, the Law Offices of Frank R. Cruz and the Law Offices of Howard G. Smith. All of these firms recently advertised that they are investigating whether Wiley issued misleading information about Hindawi to the investing public. 

In the 4th quarterly report for 2023, Napack stated that they had remedied all the problems, and were ready for “revitalization” 

“As discussed in Q3, we suspended the fast-growing special issues program after identifying a research integrity issue. This issue was the result of external misconduct by non-Wiley editors and reviewers. Essentially, Wiley decided to take a short-term hit to preserve the integrity of our journals and the value of our highly respected Wiley brand. This industry-wide issue has been widely reported on, and we believe that we now have it fully remediated in Wiley.” 

In the same report, Napack was still expressing satisfaction with Hindawi's performance since the acquisition: 

“Our expectation for Hindawi was a couple-fold. One, it would accelerate our position in that market, which it has; and that it would provide significant growth, which it has, and it will provide the ability to provide significant cascade across our portfolio that we could find homes for the many hundreds of thousands of articles that we get every year that are not published. Our expectations are the same going forward. We expect that over the next 12 to 18 months, we will be fully ramping back up. So, by '25, we're back on course with our volume growth and it should drop to the bottom line at/or we're close to the margin -- very healthy margin that it always has in our -- across all of our Open Access, but certainly across the Hindawi asset. So, the -- relative to our initial expectations, this acquisition has outperformed if you just can look aside for a minute against a very short-term thing that happened to us. But we're going to lead our way -- lead the industry out of it, and we feel very, very good about the future of our overall Open Access program.” 

So the paper mill debacle, which led to thousands of fraudulent papers being published in Hindawi journals over at least two years, is described as “a very short-term thing that happened to us” and is now “fully remediated”, was blamed on “external misconduct by non-Wiley editors and reviewers”. This leaves hanging the question of how those non-Wiley editors and reviewers not only achieved powerful positions determining what was published in Hindawi journals, but also continued to do so long after attention had been drawn to the problem by sleuths.

Regaining the market? 

Wiley is a mighty, major international publisher, and they have the potential to achieve a Hindawi revitalization, if revitalization is defined as a significant rebound in the number of papers published in Hindawi journals. The question is, which niche market does Hindawi intend to regain? Are they well-positioned to do so? Do they have any appreciation of the tension between their goal of publishing as much as possible, and the reputational costs of publishing papers that are low-quality at best and fraudulent at worst?

The sleuth Parashorea tomentella described the evolution of the niche of special issues of Hindawi journals after its acquisition in China. There is a highly competitive "first-tier" niche of authors from research universities and institutions, who have many manuscripts. China also has an extended, "second-tier" niche of authors from community colleges, polytechnics, and non-teaching hospitals. There are many, many of these potential customers, but they lack manuscripts on the one hand, and desire publications for promotion on the other. Paper mills fill the need of authors in this niche to publish and the needs of publishers to make money. It would be difficult for Hindawi to regain the first-tier niche, because most authors and institutions care about the reputation of the publisher, and even if they aren’t concerned about integrity they are spooked by unprecedented large-scale retractions. 

Hindawi is, however, in a strong position to regain the second-tier niche. First, despite all the problems, they still have many journals that are recognized by the Chinese authorities (typically those listed in databases such as WoS Core Collection and Engineering Village). Wiley has close links with those who maintain databases and may have an advantage in avoiding their journals being blacklisted. Wiley's longstanding commitment and partnership with Chinese research institutes and government stakeholders has brought them particularly close to the National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NSL/CAS), a bureaucracy that compiles a blacklist which is recognized by many Chinese institutions. On June 16, 2023, Wiley and NSL/CAS announced the establishment of a Joint Laboratory on Scientific and Technical Journal Innovation. The press release mentioned that an important topic for the joint lab is research integrity, and Liying Yang, director of journal evaluation in NSL/CAS, introduced what NSL/CAS can do, including updating their Early Warning Journal List, which aimed to target paper mills. 

For reasons unknown, NSL/CAS has been particularly kind to Hindawi journals. NSL/CAS released their controversial Early Warning Journal List in December 2020, December 2021 and January 2023. In the latest version, the Hindawi journals Biomed Research International, Complexity, Advances in Civil Engineering, Shock and Vibration, Scientific Programming and Journal of Mathematics, which had been on the blacklist, were reinstated. Other problematic Hindawi journals were never on the blacklist. In contrast, the blacklist compiled by another Chinese bureaucracy, the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC), does not show undue goodwill toward Hindawi journals. In January and February 2023, some Chinese institutions, such as Zhejiang Gongshang University and Anhui Provincial Hospital (The First Affiliated Hospital of University of Science and Technology of China), told their employees not to submit to Hindawi journals. NSL/CAS was sending a different signal from other Chinese institutions and encouraged authors to continue submitting to Hindawi journals, although this effect was offset by Clarivate's delisting of nineteen Hindawi journals three months later. 

Hindawi’s determination to retain the second-tier niche may explain why they have continued to publish their customers' manuscripts from known paper mills. For instance, an article (now retracted) was published on March 11, 2023, long after the guest editor Kaifa Zhao had been proven to be an impostor. To take another example, the Hindawi Research Integrity Team retracted nine articles from a special issue of BioMed Research International on “Minimally Invasive Treatment Protocols in Clinical Dentistry” between November 22, 2022, and February 14, 2023, but subsequently published new articles in the same special issue on topics out of scope.

 

Figure 6. A special issue (https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/si/652179/ ) of BioMed Research International published articles on a topic out of scope in between retraction statements

 

Even more alarmingly, special issues of four journals (Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine, Journal of Healthcare Engineering, Journal of Environmental and Public Health, and Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience) continued to publish questionable articles after Hindawi announced that the journals had closed on May 2, 2023, see e.g., https://pubpeer.com/publications/1F1263D5537A0EF96588929A60D15B ). In one weird case, an article that had been accepted 604 days previously was published in Journal of Healthcare Engineering on July 7, 2023. Perhaps this manuscript had been blocked by production processes or the Hindawi Research Integrity Team, but it was eventually published after the journal was closed. 

Reasons for pessimism 

The reason I am pessimistic is that so far Wiley's proposals to improve the publishing process for Hindawi journals have focused on the use of AI-based screening tools. Wiley has not committed to hiring more editors for Hindawi journals. As the number of submissions increases, the situation will only get worse if peer-review processes hosted by guest editors are assigned to overworked in-house editors to oversee. 

Wiley still has a chance to fix things. The first thing they should do is stop manuscripts received by external bad actors from continuing to be published. The second is to issue more retractions. I'm glad to see that in June 2023, Catriona MacCallum, the director of Open Science of Hindawi shared their approach to scaling up retractions, including focusing on manipulation of the process rather than author wrongdoing. Publisher retractions are painful for the publisher, journals, and authors, but they are necessary, and there are not enough of them. The third is to investigate the internal bad actors in an open and transparent manner. I would also encourage them to recruit more in-house editors, release the identities of the external bad actors they have found, and document the details of how internal controls failed so lessons can be learned. 

Most of us value our reputation for its own sake. As Shakespeare said in Othello: 

“Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, 

Is the immediate jewel of their souls: 

Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing; ’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands; 

But he that filches from me my good name 

Robs me of that which not enriches him, 

And makes me poor indeed” 

Indeed, as the Hindawi story shows, for a commercial organization, reputation is not just a desirable feel-good factor – it has huge financial implications. If an academic publisher like Wiley becomes known for boosting their profits by publishing screeds of arrant nonsense, their bottom line will ultimately suffer. Reputable researchers will not want their name associated with a publisher who behaves this way. If Wiley are not willing to control fraud because it is the right thing to do, they should at least recognize the importance of integrity for retaining the confidence of the academic institutions on whom they depend. 

 

Footnote 

* The author declares that there is no potential conflict of interest. The author uses a pseudonym because he/she lives in an authoritarian state and fears facing unpredictable political reprisals.