Guest post: Stealth corrections are still a threat to scientific integrity

Authors

René Aquarius, Floris Schoeters, Alex Glynn, Guillaume Cabanac

 

An update on stealth corrections

Last year, we published an article describing stealth corrections, a phenomenon in which a publisher makes at least one post-publication change to a scientific article, without providing a correction note or any other indicator that the publication was temporarily or permanently altered.

 

Now, we have expanded our database with newly identified stealth corrections. We also wrote a freely accessible COSIG guide describing how to report stealth corrections in a transparent fashion.

 

Difficult to pinpoint

Stealth corrections are, by nature, extremely difficult to track down and most stealth corrections are identified by science sleuths who might notice a mismatch between different versions of an article. It is impossible to provide a comprehensive overview and one must assume that we have only identified a small minority of these issues.

 

For this update we applied the same pragmatic approach in documenting stealth retractions as previously: registering stealth corrections on PubPeer ourselves, asking around within the science sleuthing community and searching the PubPeer database for terms as “no erratum”, “no corrigendum”, or “stealth” (repeat the search yourself).

 

Stealth corrections were further categorized into the following types:

• Changes in author information (addition or removal of authors, changes in author affiliation, etc.);
• Changes in content (figures, data or text, etc.);
• Changes in the record of editorial process (editor name, date of submission, acceptance or publication, etc.);
• Changes in additional information (ethics statements, conflicts of interest statements, funding information, etc.).

New cases

We found 32 published articles that were affected by stealth corrections in addition to the 131 we had identified last year. An overview of all stealth corrections (#1-163) can be found in the online database, which also contains the links to all accompanying PubPeer posts for additional detail. Table 1 shows the type of correction per publisher for the 32 new cases.

 

Table 1. Type of correction per publisher for newly identified stealth corrections. 

	Changes in additional information	Changes in author information	Changes in content	Changes in the record of editorial process
ACM	3	0	0	0
Am Phytopathological Soc	0	0	1	0
CV Literasi Indonesia	0	0	1	0
Elsevier	0	0	3	0
Impact Journals	0	0	1	0
Int Soc Computational Biology	1	0	0	0
MDPI	0	0	0	19
Oxford University Press	0	1	0	0
Springer Nature	0	0	1	0
Taylor & Francis	0	0	1	0

 

 

Why are stealth corrections still a thing?

Last year we wrote “post-publication amendments that are made silently, without a visible correction note, will give rise to questions regarding the ethics and integrity of the specific journal, editors and publisher, and might undermine the validity of the published literature as a whole”. Again, we have identified stealth corrections that might be used as a shortcut to ‘repair’ more serious issues. The three publishers with the most stealth corrections in this update were: MDPI, Elsevier, and the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).

MDPI was involved in 19 new stealth corrections. Sixteen cases (#141, #144-158) were registered in August of 2024, too late for our initial pre-print and subsequent article on stealth corrections. All of these involved moving articles out of a ‘special issue’ and into a ‘section’. What stands out for all these 16 articles, is that the special issue editor was also an author on all of these papers. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has dictated that the number of articles co-authored by a special issue editor needs to be below lower than the 25% for each special issue. When it is higher than 25%, the DOAJ can delist the journal for not adhering to best practice, as detailed on their change log. Thus, by moving these articles silently out of special issues, MDPI is retroactively lowering this percentage to adhere to the rules of the DOAJ and therefore preventing potential delisting of their journals. In September 2024 -after publication of our pre-print- MDPI refuted “that removing a Special Issue article from the digital SI website can be considered a ‘stealth correction’”. Possibly, the updated correction process (which now includes ‘minor corrections’) facilitated a complete stop of this practice by MDPI. We have not identified any recent cases, which is an encouraging sign.

In the remaining three cases (#135-137), the name of a peer reviewer was suddenly set to anonymous, while the contents of the peer review reports did not change. According to MDPI, this was done to adhere to GDPR requirements. However, this only happened after the peer reviewer was identified as being part of a review mill. The reviewer claims on PubPeer that they were not involved in writing the peer review report. These cases prove that a request for anonymity might hamper the desire for transparency and strengthening research integrity.

Elsevier was involved in 3 new stealth corrections. All of them involved changes in content. In 3 cases an image was silently replaced (#133, #139-141) according to PubPeer reports that were posted between December 2024 and May 2025. In response to our pre-print, Elsevier stated that they “do not correct articles without a formal notice”. However, in this update we -again- present clear evidence of major changes to the scientific record that went through without any formal acknowledgement in the form of a correction notice. This directly contradicts earlier statements from Elsevier. Eventually, all of these articles have been retracted, but only 4-12 months after the stealth correction was noticed, meaning there was a substantial window of time that allowed for interaction with these flawed articles, without any proper indication that there might have been a problem.

ACM silently made multiple changes to the introduction from three conference proceedings written by the conference chair (#159-161). References were removed and in one case the text was heavily altered. In all three cases, a notice of concern was also published to indicate that the peer review process had been compromised and the publisher strongly urged people not to cite the conference papers. It seems as if the ACM retroactively tried to erase the citations to the conference papers, but they did it by secretly making all kinds of alterations to the documents, which is far from ideal.

This update shows that some scientific publishers continue to use stealth corrections as a way to change the scientific record. Stealth corrections can undermine the entire enterprise of science; at the level of the individual article, the lack of a transparent correction minimizes the likelihood of those who read or cited the original version being informed of the change; on the macro level, the integrity of the published literature as a whole is compromised as readers never know for certain whether an article has been silently corrected or not. Meanwhile, there is still no consensus on issuing corrections.

 

Conclusion and recommendations

Stealth corrections are still problematic as they are sometimes used as a shortcut to ‘repair’ other integrity issues. Again, we stress that stealth corrections are notoriously difficult to find and that this update likely only shows chance findings by science sleuths. Correct documentation and transparency are of the utmost importance to uphold scientific integrity and the trustworthiness of science.

We still recommend:

• Tracking of all changes to the published record by all publishers in an open, uniform and transparent manner, preferably by online submission systems that log every change publicly, making stealth corrections impossible.
• Clear definitions and guidelines on all types of corrections.
• Sustained vigilance of the scientific community to publicly register stealth corrections. Now made easier by using our COSIG guide.

 

Acknowledgements

We thank Dorothy Bishop for hosting this update on her blog and we thank all (anonymous) science sleuths who have found and reported stealth corrections: your work is much appreciated.

Note from DVMB: Comments are moderated on this blog.  They are usually approved if they are on topic and non-anonymous.