Many publishers are getting nervous about infiltration by paper mills, who can torpedo a journal's reputation when they succeed in publishing papers that are obvious nonsense. In a recent Open Letter, a group of sleuths drew attention to an example in Scientific Reports, published by Springer Nature.
After the Open Letter was published, the paper that instigated our concern was promptly retracted by the journal, but as far as I can tell, not much else has changed. The point about a paper like this is that it is so blatantly bad that it cannot have been through any kind of serious editorial scrutiny or peer review. It acts as a canary in the coalmine: if gobbledegook is published in your journal, it's an indicator that you need to look very carefully at your editorial processes, and act immediately to remove editors who let this stuff in. Sadly, I haven't yet seen much evidence of that happening at Scientific Reports.
This post, however, concerns another publisher, MDPI, who have regularly featured on my blog, and not in a good way. Last month, I commented on the strange state of affairs whereby Finland had downgraded its classification of 187 MDPI journals because of evidence of "minimum time spend for editorial work and quality assessment", at the same time that German universities had secured a national publishing agreement with MDPI. The story I have to tell here may confirm Finland's judgement, and give Germany pause for thought. It concerns this article: Abbas, R., Amran, G. A., Hussain, I., & Ma, S. (2022). A Soft Computing View for the Scientific Categorization of Vegetable Supply Chain Issues. Logistics, 6(3), https://doi.org/10.3390/logistics6030039
As with the Springer Nature example, the first indication of problems came via the Problematic Paper Screener, the excellent system that checks articles for various red flags, including "tortured phrases". These provide an indicator that a paper has probably been plagiarised but then passed through a process that substitutes synonyms for main words, with the aim of evading plagiarism detection software. So, as noted on PubPeer, in this case we have "fluffy logic" for fuzzy logic, and "unaided ML" for unsupervised machine learning.
However, example sentences in which tortured phrases were embedded indicated a deeper problem. Most of the text is incomprehensible, and things start to get seriously weird when the authors get on to tomatoes. We are told:
.... the third creation framework considered for the creation phase is tomatoes. This creation framework is devoted to developing homegrown creatures brought up in rural settings to create vegetables. This can bring domesticated tomatoes likewise to broad or serious frameworks. Broad frameworks include creatures wandering meadows (ordinarily under the oversight of a herder). Differently, serious tomatoes are situated in shut foundations and are outfitted with ICT innovation, which empowers creatures to be observed continuously. Inside these creation frameworks, the most run-of-the-mill issues we run over are meadow observing [75], creature government assistance [76], creature conduct following [77], and tomato creation forecast and enhancement [78,79], as displayed in Figure 3.
According to a VSC point of view, the formal meanings of these issues are recorded beneath.
• Field checking: This issue is connected with the exact recognizable proof of meadow inventories to separate between the most reasonable sorts for tomatoes purposes.
• Tomato government assistance: This is centered around the example arrangement of the dehydration way of behaving in brushing creatures for investigations of creature nourishment, development, and well-being.
• Tomato growth checking: This depends on the utilization of conduct investigations to recognize early indications of medical problems and advance early negotiation.
A clue to the origin of this material comes from the cited references, which are about pigs and cattle. Anonymous PubPeer commenter Nerita vitiensis found that a substantial part of the text was adapted from a previous work by different authors, but with the topics of "livestock and fish" changed to "tomatoes and cruciferous vegetables". This explains the description of tomatoes as "creatures" under the oversight of a herder.
The authors of this piece seem seriously out of their depth, as
evidenced by the bland comments apparently written by Chat GPT that they
provided on PubPeer.
Now, one very good thing about MDPI is that it generally identifies the academic editor who handled a paper, and it sometimes also makes public the reviewer reports. This should mean that when a major foul-up like this occurs, it should be possible to identify and purge those responsible for accepting the work.
The academic editors who accepted this article are Xue-Ming Yuan, who is currently soliciting papers for a special issue in the MDPI journal Mathematics, and Anrong Xue.
The MDPI website shows reports from three named reviewers.
The first reviewer, Edyta Kardas, was concerned about the use of first-person language, and punctuation, but not apparently about statements about animated tomatoes.
She reviewed 8 papers for MDPI journals in 2024.
The second reviewer, Alejandro Vega-Muñoz focused solely on the structure of the article, but apparently did not look at the content. He has edited two special issues for other MDPI journals.
The third reviewer, Francesco Barreca, attempted a synopsis of the article (which I could not understand) and then had just two suggestions:
"The work is well done but I have some remarks:
• The figures should be review, the dimension are variable
• Moderate English changes are required"
The "moderate English changes" were unspecified. Barreca has a track record of editing a special issue of another MDPI journal.
Last week, I contacted Publication Ethics at MDPI to draw their attention to this article, noting the dereliction of duty by reviewers and editors, and suggesting that as well as retracting the paper, they should remove the editors and peer reviewers from their database. They replied to say:
"We confirm that the Editorial Office is investigating the concerns related to this paper following the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics https://publicationethics.org/ of which we are a member and our policy https://www.mdpi.com/ethics#_bookmark29.
We would like to inform you that this case is a priority for us, and we are actively working to resolve it. We will update you on the outcome of this investigation as soon as possible."
I await developments with interest. It is widely recognised that COPE guidelines are not well-suited for dealing with this kind of situation: they make the default assumption that authors should be consulted to give their perspective when criticisms are raised - a reasonable assumption in many cases, but not when there is such blatant evidence of fakery.
The most serious case of infestation of a publisher by nonsense occurred in 2022-3, when the Hindawi (owned by Wiley) was targeted by paper mills who, among other things, generated numerous papers that I labelled as AI gobbledegook sandwiches. Eventually, the publisher withdrew literally thousands of papers and closed the Hindawi brand, after complaints by shareholders started impacting profits.
Like many of the sleuths who track down paper mills, I have become cynical about the commitment to research integrity that is claimed by many publishers, including MDPI. But I do believe they will act when it is in their interests to do so. As the amount of nonsense and disinformation in the scientific literature increases, I think we'll enter a new phase where trustworthiness of journal contents will start to have much higher value. If you want to be taken seriously as a peer-reviewed journal, you just cannot continue to pump out articles accompanied by superficial verbiage from "peer reviewers" that makes no real contact with the subject matter. Publishers will need to act now to clean up their editorial boards if they want to stay in business.
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