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. 

Does Elsevier's negligence pose a risk to public health?

 

Yesterday, Retraction Watch published a piece about a notorious 2020 article by Gautret et al that had promoted the idea that hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID-19. Despite numerous concerns, the article has not been retracted from the International Journal for Antimicrobial Agents, a journal that is co-owned by the publisher, Elsevier, and The International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (ISAC).

On June 3rd, a group of concerned scientists wrote to Elsevier asking for the paper to be retracted in light of the evidence that the paper was flawed and had serious consequences for public health. The fact that the article pops up in the Web of Science database with a trophy symbol denoting it as a 'highly cited paper' just adds to concerns that it is still being taken seriously, giving credence to those who continue to promote an ineffective drug, hydroxychloroquine, to treat COVID-19.

Elsevier's response? They are "reopening the investigation" into the paper. This is the investigation that previously decided nothing needed to be done, despite a damning report by a group of respected experts. In their reply to the letter they stated:

"We cannot currently provide further detail as to the particulars of this investigation as it remains ongoing, and is necessarily confidential while we allow time to discuss our concerns with the authors as part of due process and in line with COPE recommendations. I will however be more then glad to keep you appraised of any final decisions in due course."

As one experienced in these communications, I can confirm that this is the kind of reply you get by a publisher who is kicking the issue into the long grass in the hope that you will forget about it and go away. The wonderful phrase "it remains ongoing" typically refers to something that goes on, and on, and on, and "due course" can take years.

A pertinent question is what COPE recommendations are being followed: there are a whole range of flowcharts provided by COPE for different circumstances. The most relevant in this case would appear to be this one on "Concerns about risk in published data".

Early on in the flowchart, the decision tree asks "Based on the initial assessment, should the dataset be removed or restricted during the investigation to mitigate potential risk?" If the answer is YES, then the appropriate action is "Remove public access to the dataset while following up on the concerns."

Given that the article is still freely available on the web, we have to ask ourselves, is Elsevier being negligent here? Have they decided that there is no risk, despite the evidence that we and others have provided that public health is endangered by publicising misleading data on an ineffective drug? Or do they agree that there is risk, but deem it inconvenient for them to take action?

Universities vs Elsevier: who has the upper hand?

 

The academic publisher Elsevier is currently negotiating a deal with UK universities. In Oxford, as in other universities, there have been extensive discussions about the proposed deal; the goals are to reduce costs to sustainable levels and to provide full and immediate open access to UK research. I have a nasty feeling that we could end up in the situation of those at the COP summit: with a deal that where the publishers feel they are giving away a huge amount, while the consumers are still unsatisfied. 

In the print era, publishers already had a large profit margin.  I was a journal editor when electronic publishing first came in, and I remember discussions with the publisher - who was clearly very nervous about how this might damage their bottom line. With some clever business practices, such as bundling, they managed to keep going, making more rather than less money.

Other new developments - the advance of metrics and requirements for open access publishing - also pose challenges to them, but their response, like any savvy business, is to take control of these new developments and find a way to profit from them as well.

So should we go along with this? The discussions have largely centred around money, and this is a real concern. Publishers charge massively inflated subscription charges, taking as profit money that our libraries could otherwise put to good use. But the problems go way beyond that, including blocking open access to authors' own work, and giving poor quality and even fraudulent material a veneer of respectability. The publisher currently has considerable power over what gets published but takes little responsibility when things go wrong.

But we also have power, and I think it's time we started to wield it. I have two proposals: one radical and the other less so, both of which go beyond what is currently being considered in the JISC discussions.

The radical option: move publishing in-house  

In an ideal world, we would not have any deals with for-profit publishers. Universities would take control of academic publishing. A model which I have found works well is the Wellcome Trust journal Wellcome Open Research (WOR). I served on its Editorial Advisory Board in the first years of its operation and I have published eight papers in WOR. 

Quality control is maintained by requiring that work published in WOR has been Wellcome-Trust funded. The platform is paid for by the Wellcome Trust, and all material is Open Access, with no charge to authors.

Universities could use this as a model for developing their own platforms for publishing work of their researchers. As with Wellcome Trust, researchers would be encouraged rather than required to publish there. Setting up and maintaining the platform would cost money, but this might be covered by savings from stepping back from deals with big publishers. This is not a perfect solution, of course; we would still want access to past material published by traditional publishers. But I feel this option should be given serious consideration.

The less radical option. An agreement with Elsevier that reflects what we want and need 

If we are to retain a working relationship with Elsevier, then we need to ensure that we are getting value for money, and that they are delivering what we want.

One way in which they fail to do this is through the copyright agreements that they require authors to sign. I agree with Sally Rumsey that any publisher that does not allow an author to retain rights to their own work is problematic. Furthermore, there is concern that even if Elsevier were to say they agreed to author rights retention, they would continue to adopt practices that would mislead authors into signing away their rights.

Another issue is how publishers deal with matters related to misbehaviour by editors and authors. We have a number of serious problems with the academic publishing system that have been developing for years, and have been thrown into stark relief by the pandemic. Publications in journals are a kind of academic currency, with potentially huge rewards in terms of promotion, pay and tenure of academic staff. Unfortunately, this means that some people will go to great lengths to procure publications, and this can include fraudulent means. A reputable publisher should recognise and indeed anticipate such problems and take steps to deal with them. Elsevier has been notably poor in doing so. I will give a handful of examples.

Clearly erroneous/fraudulent work remains in the literature In recent years, a massive problem has been discovered with so-called paper mills - a form of industrialised cheating that involves generation of literally thousands of fake papers.  This phenomenon was discussed at a meeting this summer, the Computational Research Integrity Conference (CRI-Conf), which brought together some of the scientists who uncovered paper mills and representatives of publishers (including Elsevier) and university integrity officers. A repeated complaint of the 'data sleuths' (scientists who uncovered the paper mills) was that when the problems were drawn to the attention of the editors or publishers, typically nothing was done.  Some of these papers are highly cited and have medical implications - see, for instance work by Jennifer Byrne and Cyril Labbé on cancer biology, or by Elisabeth Bik on image manipulations.

To its credit, Elsevier was recently cited as acting promptly when a cache of nonsense papers in special issues was uncovered, but one still has to ask how these papers, some of which were complete gibberish, originally got through the supposedly rigorous peer-review process. For another recent example, see here.

Part of the problem seems to be that there is very little oversight of editors.  I first became aware of Elsevier's lax attitude to research integrity when I discovered a ring of editors. There was overwhelming evidence that a set of editors were publishing one another's papers in their journals, with publication lags so brief as to indicate there had not been peer review. Emails to Elsevier received no reply, and so I started reporting the events on my blog. This created such publicity that Elsevier then posted a reply, but initially they denied that any papers had been published without peer review. Eventually, as the evidence mounted up, they were forced to acknowledge the problem, and claimed to be investigating it, but at no point did they communicate with me, and their investigation went on for years and has never led to any consequences. One of the offending editors, Johnny Matson, quietly disappeared without comment and is now editing another journal for another publisher. The unreviewed papers, many of which are concerned with intervention for children with developmental disorders, remain in the literature. 

More recently I did a bibliometric analysis of editors of psychology journals who publish prolifically in their own journals, and broke down the results by publisher. Elsevier had the highest number of editors-in-chief in this category,

A related case in another field is that of Didier Raoult, who was senior author on a paper advocating hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19 that appeared in 2020 in an Elsevier journal for which he was Editor-in-Chief. It has subsequently been shown to be riddled with methodological errors, but, although Elsevier claimed to be investigating it in April 2020, it has not been retracted.

At the CRI-Conf publishers said that they were doing their best, but the problem of fake and fraudulent practices was so huge they could not be expected to tackle all of it. Yet we know publishers make enormous profits, so why aren't they putting more effort into checking the integrity of the work they publish - and dealing promptly with the problems that are drawn to their attention? Elsevier is not the only large publisher to be affected, but if it wants to be seen as a leader in the field, it should recognise that integrity of published material is of supreme importance - especially in clinical fields where people's health and wellbeing can be affected (as in the cases of Raoult and Matson noted above).

If UK Universities do strike a deal with Elsevier, then they should take the opportunity to include in any future contract conditions requirements that: 

(a) Elsevier allows authors the retention of the rights to their publications and  

(b) it provides annually an open report on the number of integrity issues that have been raised about its publications and how these have been dealt with. 

This would go some way toward ensuring that we get value for money, and are not simply adding to the profits of a company whose underlying ethos is not aligned with promoting scientific quality.

Universities have historically been extremely meek in accepting the terms and conditions imposed by big publishers, who have in turn treated academics as a cash cow. We on the one hand produce for free the product that they sell, and then pay to publish and read it. They cannot survive without the research created in Universities: we should start recognising that we need not bow down to their demands.

DISCLAIMER: I am writing in a personal capacity and not as a representative of the University of Oxford.

14/11/21

P.S. Some further examples of integrity problems with Elsevier have been pointed out to me on Twitter:

Geoff Frampton (@Geoff_Frampton) noted 'Elsevier had the largest market share among the publishers of retracted Covid-19 articles in our study' 

Patricia Murray (@PMurray_65) tweeted: Elsevier have failed to retract this 2008 Lancet paper that is known to be fraudulent and poses a risk to patients: https://thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(08)61598-6/references… The paper stated the so-called 'bioengineered' airway had "a normal appearance and mechanical properties at 4 months." 

It is particularly shocking that the publisher is still making this article available (at a cost of $31) given that the author had a prison sentence for faked research, and conducted unethical experiments on seriously ill patients: see this report. 

PPS - it gets worse. There have been strenuous attempts to get the journal to retract the paper, to no avail. This has made the national news in the UK.

 

Comments on this blog are welcome, but may only appear after a delay as they are moderated to avoid spam. 

Faux peer-reviewed journals: a threat to research integrity

 

Despite all its imperfections, peer review is one marker of scientific quality – it indicates that an article has been evaluated prior to publication by at least one, and usually several, experts in the field. An academic journal that does not use peer review would not usually be regarded as a serious source and we would not expect to see it listed in a database such as Clarivate Analytic's Web of Science Core Collection which "includes only journals that demonstrate high levels of editorial rigor and best practice". Scientists are often evaluated by their citations in Web of Science, with the assumption that this will include only peer-reviewed articles. This makes gaming of citations harder than is the case for less selective databases such as Google Scholar. The selective criteria for inclusion, and claims by Clarivate Analytics to take research integrity very seriously, are presumably the main reasons why academic institutions are willing to pay for access to Web of Science, rather than relying on Google Scholar. 

Nevertheless, some journals listed in Web of Science include significant numbers of documents that are not peer-reviewed. I first became aware of this when investigating the publishing profiles of authors with remarkably high rates of publications in a small number of journals. I found that Mark Griffiths, a hyperprolific author who has been interviewed about his astounding rate of publication by the Times Higher Education, has a junior collaborator, Mohammed Mamun, who clearly sees Griffiths as a role model and is starting to rival him in publication rate. Griffiths is a co-author on 31 of 33 publications authored by Mamun since 2019. While still an undergraduate, Mamun has become the self-styled Director of the Undergraduate Research Organization in Dhaka, subsequently renamed as the Centre for Health Innovation, Networking, Training, Action and Research – Bangladesh. These institutions do not appear to have any formal link with an academic institution, though on ORCID, Mamun lists an ongoing educational affiliation to Jahangirnagar University. His H-index from Web of Science is 11. This drops if one excludes self-citations, which constitute around half of his citations, but nevertheless, this is remarkable for an undergraduate.

Of the 31 papers listed on Web of Science as coauthored by Mamun and Griffiths, 19 are categorised as letters to the Editor. Letters are a rather odd and heterogeneous category. In most journals they will be brief comments on papers published in the journal, or responses to such comments, and in such cases it is not unusual for the editor to make a decision to publish or not without seeking peer review. However, the letters coauthored by Griffiths and Mamun go beyond this kind of content, and include some brief reports of novel data, as well as case reports on suicide or homicide gleaned from press reports*. I took a closer look at three journals where these letters appeared to try and understand how such material fitted in with their publication criteria. 

The International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction (Springer) featured in an earlier blogpost, on the basis of publishing a remarkably high number of articles authored by Griffiths. In that analysis I did not include letters. The journal gives no guidelines about the format or content of letters, and has published only 16 of them since 2019, but 10 of these are authored by Griffiths, mostly with Mamun. As noted in my prior blogpost, the journal provides no information about dates of submission and acceptance, so one cannot tell whether letters were peer-reviewed. The publisher told me last July and confirmed again in September that they are investigating the issues I raised in my last blogpost, but there has to date been no public report on the outcome.  

Psychiatry Research, published by Elsevier, is explicit that Case Reports can be included as letters, and provides formatting information (750-1000 words or less, up to 5 references, no tables or figures). Before 2019, around 2-4% of publications in the journal were letters, but this jumped to an astounding 22.4% in 2020, perhaps reflecting what has been termed 'covidization' of research.

The Asian Journal of Psychiatry (AsJP), also published by Elsevier, provides formatting information only (600-800 words, 10 references, 1 figure or table), and does not specify what would constitute the content of letters, but it publishes an extremely large number of them, as shown in Figure 1. This trend started before 2020, so cannot be attributed solely to COVID-mania. 

 

Figure 1: Categorization of documents published in Asian Journal of Psychiatry between 2015 and 2020.

For most journals, letters constitute a negligible proportion of their output, and so it is unlikely to have much impact whether or not they are peer reviewed. However, for a journal like AsJP, where letters outnumber regular articles, the peer review status of letters becomes of interest.  

The only information one can obtain on this point is indirect, by scanning the submission and acceptance dates of articles to see if the lag between these two is so short as to suggest there was no peer review. Relevant data for all letters published in AsJP and Psychiatry Research are shown in Table 1. It is apparent that there is a wide range of publication lags, some extending for weeks or months, but that lags of 7 days or less are not uncommon. There is no indication that Mamun/Griffiths have favourable treatment, but they benefit from the same rapid acceptance rate as other letters, with 40-50% chance of acceptance within two weeks.  

 

Table 1: Proportions of Letters categorized by publication lag in two journals publishing a large number of Letters. 

Thus an investigation into unusual publishing patterns by one pair of authors has drawn attention to at least two journals that appear to provide an easy way to accumulate a large number of publications that are not peer-reviewed but are nevertheless cited in Web of Science. If one adds a high rate of self-citation to the mix, and a willingness of editors to accept recycled newspaper reports as case studies, one starts to understand how it is possible for an inexperienced undergraduate to build up a substantial number of citations. 

I have drawn this situation to the attention of the integrity officers at Springer and Elsevier, but my previous experience with the Matson publication ring does not instil me with confidence that publishers will take any steps to monitor or control such editorial practices.  

Clarivate Analytics recently published a report on Research Integrity, in which they note how "all manner of interventions and manipulations are nowadays directed to the goal of attaining scores and a patina of prestige, for individual or journal, although it may be a thin coat hiding a base metal." They described various methods used by researchers to game citations, but did not include the use of non-peer-reviewed categories of paper to gain numerous citations. They describe technological solutions to improve integrity, but I would argue they need to add to their armamentarium a focus on the peer review process. The lag between submission and acceptance is a far from perfect indicator but it can give a rough proxy for the likelihood that peer review was undertaken. Requiring journals to make this information available, and to include it in the record of Web of Science, would go some way to identifying at least one form of gaming. 

No doubt Prof Griffiths regards himself as a benign influence, helping an enthusiastic and energetic young person from a low-income country establish himself. He has an impressive number of collaborators from all over the world, many of whom have written in his support. Collaboration between those from very different cultures is generally to be welcomed. And I must stress that I have no objection to someone young and inexperienced making a scientific contribution - that is entirely in line with Mertonian norms of universalism. It is the departure from the norm of disinterestedness that concerns me. An obsession with 'publish or perish' leads to gaming of publications and citation counts as a way to get ahead. Research is treated like a game where the focus becomes one's own success rather than the advancement of science. This is a consequence of our distorted incentive structures and it has a damaging effect on scientific quality. It is frankly depressing to see such attitudes being inculcated in junior researchers from around the world.

 *Addendum

Letters co-authored by Mamun and Griffiths based on newspaper reports (from Web of Science). Self-cites refers to number of citations to articles by Griffiths and/or Mamun. Publication lags in square brackets calculated from date of submission and date of acceptance taken from the journal website. The script used to extract these dates, and .csv files with journal records, are available on: https://github.com/oscci/miscellaneous, see Faux Peer Review.rmd 

Mamun, MA; Griffiths, MD (2020) A rare case of Bangladeshi student suicide by gunshot due to unusual multiple causalities Asian Journal of Psychiatry, 49 10.1016/j.ajp.2020.101951 [5 self-cites, lag 6 days] 

Mamun, MA; Misti, JM; Griffiths, MD (2020) Suicide of Bangladeshi medical students: Risk factor trends based on Bangladeshi press reports Asian Journal of Psychiatry, 48 10.1016/j.ajp.2019.101905 [2 self-cites, lag 91 days] 

Mamun, MA; Chandrima, RM; Griffiths, MD (2020) Mother and Son Suicide Pact Due to COVID-19-Related Online Learning Issues in Bangladesh: An Unusual Case Report International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 10.1007/s11469-020-00362-5 [14 self-cites]

Bhuiyan, AKMI; Sakib, N; Pakpour, AH; Griffiths, MD; Mamun, MA (2020) COVID-19-Related Suicides in Bangladesh Due to Lockdown and Economic Factors: Case Study Evidence from Media Reports International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 10.1007/s11469-020-00307-y [10 self-cites]

Mamun, MA; Griffiths, MD (2020) Young Teenage Suicides in Bangladesh-Are Mandatory Junior School Certificate Exams to Blame? International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 10.1007/s11469-020-00275-3 [11 self-cites]

Mamun, MA; Siddique, A; Sikder, MT; Griffiths, MD (2020) Student Suicide Risk and Gender: A Retrospective Study from Bangladeshi Press Reports International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 10.1007/s11469-020-00267-3 [6 self-cites]

Griffiths, MD; Mamun, MA (2020) COVID-19 suicidal behavior among couples and suicide pacts: Case study evidence from press reports Psychiatry Research, 289 10.1016/j.psychres.2020.113105 [10 self-cites, lag161 days] 

Mamun, MA; Griffiths, MD (2020) PTSD-related suicide six years after the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh Psychiatry Research, 287 10.1016/j.psychres.2019.112645 [0 self-cites, 2 days] 

 

PEPIOPs – prolific editors who publish in their own publications

I recently reported on a method for identifying authors who contribute an unusually high proportion of papers to a specific journal. As I noted in my previous blogpost, one cannot assume any wrongdoing just on the grounds of a high publication rate, but when there is a close link between the author in question and the journal's editor, then this raises concerns about preferential treatment and integrity of the peer review process.

In running my analyses, I also found some cases where there wasn't just a close link between the most prolific author in a journal and the editor: they were one and the same person! At around the time I was unearthing these results, Elisabeth Bik tweeted to ask if anyone had examples of editors publishing in their own journals. I realised the analysis scripts I had developed for the 'percent by most prolific' analysis could be readily adapted to look at this question, and so I analysed journals in the broad domain of psychology and behavioural science from six publishers: Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor and Francis, Sage, Elsevier and American Psychological Association (APA). I focused on those responsible for editorial decisions – typically termed Editor-in-Chief or Associate Editor. Sometimes this was hard to judge: in general, I included 'Deputy editors' with 'Editors-in-Chief' if they were very few in number. I ignored members of editorial boards.

Before reporting the findings, I thought I should consult more widely about whether people think it is appropriate for an editor to publish in their own journal.

As a starting point, I looked at guidelines that the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has provided for editors  

Can editors publish in their own journal? 
While you should not be denied the ability to publish in your own journal, you must take extra precautions not to exploit your position or to create an impression of impropriety. Your journal must have a procedure for handling submissions from editors or members of the editorial board that will ensure that the peer review is handled independently of the author/editor. We also recommend that you describe the process in a commentary or similar note once the paper is published.

They link to a case report that notes how this issue can be particularly problematic if the journal is in a narrow field with few publication outlets, and the author is likely to be identifiable even if blinding is adopted.

I thought that it would be interesting to see what the broader academic community thought about this. In a Twitter poll I asked specifically about Editors-in-Chief:

The modal response was that it was OK for an Editor-in-Chief to publish in their own journal at a modest rate (once a year or less). There was general disapproval of editors publishing prolifically in their own journals – even though I emphasised that I was referring to situations where the editorial process was kept independent of the author, as recommended by COPE.

My poll question was not perfectly phrased - I did not specify the type of article: it is usual, for instance, for an editor to write editorials! But I later clarified that I meant regular articles and reviews, and I think most people interpreted it in that way.

The poll provoked some useful debate among those who approved and disapproved of editors publishing in their own journals.

Let's start with some of the reasons against this practice. I should lay my cards on the table and state that personally I am in agreement with Antonia Hamilton, who tweeted to say that as Editor in Chief of the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology she would not be submitting papers from her lab to that journal during her term of office, citing concerns about Conflict of Interest. When I was Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, I felt the same: I was concerned that my editorial colleagues would be put in a difficult position if they had to handle one of my papers, and if my papers were accepted, then it might be seen as involving a biased decision, even if it that was not the case. Chris Chambers, who was among the 34% who thought an Editor-in-Chief should never publish in their own journal, expressed concerns about breaches of confidentiality, given that the Editor-in-Chief would be able to access identities of reviewers. Others, though, questioned whether that was the case at all journals.

Turning to those who thought it was acceptable for an Editor-in-Chief to publish in their own journal, several people argued that it would be unfair, not just on the editor themselves, but also on members of their research group, if presence of an editorial co-author meant they could not submit to the journal. How much of an issue this is will depend, of course, on how big your research group is, and what other publication outlets are available.  Several people felt there was a big difference between cases where the editor was lead author, and those where they played a more minor role. The extreme case is when an editor is a member of a large research consortium led by someone else. It would seem unduly restrictive to debar a paper by a consortium of 100 researchers just because one of them was the Editor in Chief of the journal. It is worth remembering too that, while being a journal editor is a prestigious role, it is hard work, and publishers may be concerned that it becomes a seriously unattractive option if a major outlet for papers is suddenly off-limits.

Be this as it may, the impression from the Twitter poll was that three papers or more per annum starts to look excessive. In my analysis, shown here I found several journals where the Editor-in-Chief had coauthored 15 or more articles (excluding editorials/commentaries) in their own journal between 2015 and 2019.  I refer to these as PEPIOPs (prolific editors who publish in their own publications). For transparency, I've made my methods and results available, so that others can extend the analysis if they wish to do so: see https://github.com/oscci/Bibliometric_analyses. More legible versions of the tables are also available.

Table 1 shows the number of journals with a PEPIOP, according to publisher. 

Table 1: Number of journals with prolific authors. Columns AE and EIC indicate cases where Associate Editor or Editor-in-Chief published 15+ papers in the journal between 2015-2019

The table makes it clear that it is relatively rare for an Editor-in-Chief to be a PEPIOP: there were no cases for APA journals, and the highest number was 5.6% for Elsevier journals. Note that there are big differences between publishers in terms of how common it is for any author to publish 15+ papers in the journal over 5 years: this was true for around 25% of the Elsevier and Springer journals, and much less common for Sage, APA and Taylor & Francis. This probably  reflects the subject matter of the journals - prolific publication, often on multiauthored papers, is more common in biosciences than social sciences.

Individual PEPIOPs are shown in Table 2. An asterisk denotes and Editor-in-Chief who authored more articles in the journal than any other person between 2015-2019.

These numbers should be treated with caution – I did not check whether any of these editors had only recently adopted the editorial role - largely because this information is not easy to find from journal websites*. I looked at a small sample of papers from individual PEPIOPs to see if there was anything I had overlooked, but I haven't checked every article - as there a great many of them.  There was one case where this revealed misclassification: the editor of Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health wrote regular short commentaries of around 800 words summarising other papers: this seems an entirely unremarkable thing for an editor to do, but they were classified by Web of Science as 'articles' which led to him being categorised as a PEPIOP.  This illustrates how bibliometrics can be misleading.

Table 2: Editors-in-chief who published 15+ papers in own journal 2015-2019

In general I did not find any ready explanation for highly prolific outputs.  And I where I did spot checks I found only one case where there was an explanatory note of the kind COPE recommended (in the journal Maturitas) - on the contrary, in many cases there was a statement confirming no conflict of interest for any of the authors. Sometimes there were lists of conflicts relating to commercial aspects, but it was clear that authors did not regard their editorial role as posing a conflict. It was also worth mentioning there were cases where an Editor-in-Chief was senior author.

The more I have pondered this, the more I realise that the reason why I am concerned particularly by Editor-in-Chief PEPIOPs is because this is the person who is ultimately responsible for integrity of the publication process. Although publishers increasingly are alert to issues of research integrity, journal websites typically advise readers to contact the Editor-in-Chief if there is a problem. Complaints about editorial decisions, demands for retractions, or concerns about potential fraud or malpractice all come to the Editor-in-Chief. That's fine provided the Editor-in-Chief is a pillar of respectability. The problem is that not all editors are the paragons that we'd like them to be: one can adopt rather a jaundiced view after encountering editors who don't even bother to reply to expressions of concern, or adopt a secretive or dismissive attitude if plausible problems in their journal are flagged up. And there are also cases on record where an editor has abused the power of their position to enhance their own publication record. For this reason, I would strongly advise any Editor-in-Chief not to be a PEPIOP; it just looks bad, even if a robust, independent editorial process has been followed. We need to have confidence and trust in those who act as gatekeepers to journals.

My principal suggestion is that publishers could improve their record for integrity if they went beyond just endorsing COPE guidelines and started to actively check whether those guidelines are adhered to. 

*Note: 21st Aug 2020: A commenter on this blogpost has noted that Helai Huang fits this category - this editor has only been in post since 1 Jan 2020, so the period of prolific publication predated being an editor-in-chief.

Editorial integrity: Publishers on the front line

Thanks to some live tweeting by Anna Sharman (@sharmanedit), I've become aware that the 13th Conference of the European Association of Science Editors (EASE) is taking place in Strasbourg this weekend.

The topic is "Scientific integrity: editors on the front line", and the programme acknowledges Elsevier, who presumably have contributed funding for the conference.

It therefore seems timely to give a brief update of developments following three blogposts I wrote during February-March 2015, documenting some peculiar editorial behaviour at four journals: Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders (RASD: Elsevier), Research in Developmental Disabilities (RIDD: Elsevier), Developmental Neurorehabilitation (DN: Informa Healthcare) and Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities (JDPD: Springer).

To do the story full justice, you need to read these blogposts, but in brief, blogpost 1 described how Johnny Matson, the then editor of both RASD and RIDD had published numerous articles in his own journal, and engaged in frequent self-citation, leading to his receiving a 'highly cited' badge from Thomson Reuters. In the comments on that blogpost, another intriguing factor emerged, which was Matson's tendency to accept papers with little or no review. This was denied by Elsevier, despite clear evidence of very short acceptance lags that were incompatible with review.

Blogpost 2 was prompted by Matson defending himself against accusations of self-citation by pointing out that he published in journals that he did not edit. I checked this out and found he had numerous papers in two other journals: DN and JDPD, and that the median lag between a paper of his being submitted and accepted in DN was one day. (JDPD does not provide data on publication lags). I therefore looked at the editors of those journals, and found that they themselves were publishing remarkable numbers of papers in RASD and RIDD, again with extremely short publication lags. A trio of editors and editorial board members (Jeff Sigafoos, Giulio Lancioni and Mark O'Reilly), co-authored no less than 140 papers in RASD and RIDD between 2010 and 2014, typically with acceptance times of less than 2 weeks. Some of the papers in RIDD were not even in the topic area of developmental disabilities, but covered neurological conditions acquired in adulthood.

In blogpost 3, I turned the focus on to the publisher of RASD and RIDD, Elsevier, to query why they had not done anything about such irregular editorial practices. I did a further analysis of publication lags in RIDD, showing that they had dropped precipitately between 2008 and 2012, and that there was a small band of authors whose prolific papers were published there at amazing speed. I provided all the statistical data to support my case, including interactive spreadsheets that made it easy to determine which editors and authors had been benefiting from the slack editorial standards at these journals.

There was some interesting fall-out from all of this. The second blogpost drew fire from supporters of the editors I had "outed", accusing me of bad behaviour and threatening to complain to my university. Since everything I had said was backed by evidence, this did not concern me. I received heartfelt messages of support from people who were appalled that a particular approach to autism intervention had been promoted by this group of editors, who were in effect using their status to gain the veneer of scientific credibility for work which was not in fact peer-reviewed.  I was also contacted by several academics telling me that everyone knew this had been going on for years, but nobody had done anything; this level of passivity was surprising given that many were angry that  authors had reaped benefits from their staggeringly high publication rate, while those who were outside the charmed circle were left behind. I was urged to go further and raise my concerns with the universities employing those who were capitalising on, or engaging in, lax editorial behaviour. I do, however, have an extremely demanding job and I hoped that I had done enough by shining a light on dubious practices, and providing the full datasets that provided evidence. However, I now wonder if I should have been more pro-active.

I wrote to express my concerns to publishers of all four journals, and had my correspondence acknowledged. But then? Well, not a lot.

It's clear that Elsevier has taken some action. Indeed, my first blogpost was prompted by Michelle Dawson noting on Twitter that the editorial boards of RASD and RIDD had mysteriously disappeared from the online journals. She had previously noted Matson's pattern of mega-self-citation, and I had written directly to him, with copy to the publisher, some months previously to express concern, when I realised that I was listed as a member of the editorial board of RASD. Elsevier did not acknowledge my letter, but it is possible that the changes to the editorial boards that they had started were linked to my concerns.

The first direct response I had from Elsevier was some weeks after my final blogpost, when they explained that they were looking into the situation regarding unreviewed papers, but that this was a huge job and would take a long time. They were presumably disinclined to rely on the files that I had deposited on Open Science Framework, which show the identity and submission and acceptance data for every paper in RASD and RIDD.  They did appoint new editors and a small group of associate editors for both journals, all with good track records for integrity.

I have heard on the grapevine that they are now evaluating articles published in those journals that have been identified as not having undergone peer review; some of those approached to do these evaluations have mentioned this to me. It's rather unclear how this is going to work, given that, across the two journals, there are nearly 1000 papers where the available data indicate a lag from receipt to acceptance of under 2 weeks. I guess we should be glad that at least the publisher is taking some action, albeit at a snail's pace, but I am dubious as to whether there will be any retractions.

Meanwhile, Developmental Neurorehabilitation changed publisher around the time I was writing, and is now under the care of Taylor and Francis. I wrote to the publisher explaining my concerns and received a polite reply, but then heard no more. I note that the Editor in Chief is now Wendy Machalicek, who previously co-edited the journal with Russell Lang. Lang's doctoral advisor was Mark O'Reilly, editor of JDPD, and one of the prolific trio who featured in blogpost 2. Lang himself co-authored 24 papers in RASD and 13 in RIDD, and 35 of these 39 papers were accepted within 2 weeks of receipt. Machalicek has published 11 papers in RASD and 5 in RIDD, and 12 of these 16 papers were accepted within 2 weeks of receipt.  She also did her doctorate in O'Reilly's department, and several of her papers are co-authored with him. In an editorial last year, Lang and Machalicek announced changes to the journal, some of which seem to be prompted by a desire to make the reviewing process more rigorous under the new publisher. However, one change is of particular interest: the scope of the journal will be broadened to consider "developmental disability from a lifespan perspective; wherein, it is acknowledged that development occurs throughout a person's life and a range of injuries, diseases and other impairments can cause delayed or abnormal development at any stage of life." That will be good news for Giulio Lancioni, who was previously publishing papers on coma patients, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and Alzheimer's disease in RIDD. He and his collaborators – Jeff Sigafoos, Mark O'Reilly, as well as Russell Lang and Johnny Matson – are all current members of the editorial board of the journal.

It seems to be business as usual at the Springer title, Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities. Mark O'Reilly is still the editor, with Lang and Sigafoos as associate editors; Lancioni, Machalicek and Matson are all on the editorial board. Springer's willingness to turn a blind eye to editors playing the system becomes clear when one sees that a recent title, "Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders" has as Editor-in-Chief no less a personage than Johnny Matson. And, surprise, surprise, the editorial board includes Lang, Sigafoos and Lancioni.

One of the overarching problems I uncovered when navigating my way around this situation was that there is no effective route for a whistleblower who has uncovered evidence of dubious behaviour by editors. Elsevier has developed a Publishing Ethics Resource Kit  but it is designed to help editors dealing with ethical issues that arise with authors and reviewers. The general advice if you encounter an ethical problem is to contact the editor. The Committee on Publication Ethics also issues guidance, but it is an advisory body with no powers. One would hope that publishers would act with integrity when a serious problem with an editor is revealed, but if my experience is anything to go by, they are extremely reluctant to act and will weave very large carpets to brush the problems under.

Will Elsevier say sorry?

Elsevier, the publisher of Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders (RASD) and Research in Developmental Disabilities (RIDD) is no stranger to controversy. It became the focus of a campaign in 2012 because of its pricing strategies and restrictive practices. Elsevier responded that the prices it charged were fair because of the added value it brought to the publishing process. Among other things they claimed that: "We pay editors who build a distinguished brand that is set apart from 27,000 other journals. We identify peer reviewers."

Well, the claim of added value is exploded by the recent revelations of goings-on at RASD and RIDD as documented in my recent blogposts here and here. One of the points to emerge from a detailed scrutiny of publications data is that not only was there evidence of the editor publishing numerous papers in his own journal: in addition, he was frequently bypassing the peer review process altogether. Evidence on this point is indirect, because the published journals do not document the peer review process itself. However, it is possible to look at the lag from receipt of the paper to acceptance, which can be extracted separately for each individual paper. I have looked at this further using merged data on publication lag with information available from Web of Science to create a dataset that contains all papers published in RIDD between 2004 and 2014, accompanied by the dates for receipt and acceptance of papers.

I was able to extract this information for 2060 papers. There were 23 papers for which the date information was not available: 15 of these were authored by the editor. The median publication lag for the remainder is shown by year in Figure 1.  This shows a fascinating progression.

Figure 1. Acceptance lags in days, and % papers with revision

Between 2004-2006, it seems that RIDD was a perfectly normal journal. The lag from receipt to acceptance was 3-4 months, and nearly all papers underwent some revision during that period. Fewer than 4% of papers were accepted within 3 weeks. In 2007, the sister journal RASD was launched, and the editor started to accept papers with shorter lags and without revision. During 2008-2011, the median lag between receipt and acceptance fell to two weeks or less, and only a minority of papers underwent revision.  Subsequently, this pattern of editorial behaviour was reversed to some extent, and by 2014 we were back to a median lag of 80 days with 78% of papers undergoing revision.

Nevertheless, all was not well. In my previous post, I noted that a group of people with editorial associations with these journals, Sigafoos, O'Reilly and Lancioni, had published numerous papers in RASD and RIDD. I had analysed the acceptance lags for RASD and shown they were substantially shorter than for other authors.  Figure 2 shows part of a larger figure which can be found here; it demonstrates that remarkably short acceptance times for papers with Sigafoos as author (usually accompanied by Lancioni and O'Reilly) were also seen in RIDD. The full dataset on which these figures are based is available here*.

Figure 2: Lag from receipt to acceptance for RIDD papers 2010-2014. Black dots show papers authored by Sigafoos

It is difficult to believe that nobody at Elsevier was aware of what was going on.  In 2011, at the height of the rapid turnaround times, there was a fivefold increase from the 2004 level of submissions. Many journals have grown in size over this period, but this was massive. Furthermore, the publisher was recording the dates of receipt and acceptance with each paper: did nobody actually look at what they were publishing and think that something was odd? This was not a brief hiccup: it went on for years. Either the publisher was slumbering on the job, or they were complicit with the editor.

Most academics find publishing a paper a stressful and tedious business. How nice, then, you might think, to have a journal that speeds the process along and avoids the need to grapple with reviewer comments. I have heard from several people who tell me they published a paper in RIDD; when it was accepted without review, they were surprised, but hardly in a mood to complain about it.  So does it matter?

Well, yes. It matters because RIDD and RASD are presented to the world as peer-reviewed journals, backed up by the 'distinguished brand' of Elsevier. We live in times when there is competition for jobs and prizes, and these will go to those who have plenty of publications in peer-reviewed journals, preferably with high citations. If an editor bypasses peer review and encourages self-citation, then the quality of the work in the journal is misrepresented and some people gain unfair advantages from this. The main victims here are those who published in RASD and RIDD in good faith, thinking that acceptance in the journal was a marker of quality. They will be feeling pretty bitter about the 'added value' of Elsevier right now, as the value of their own work will be degraded by association with these journals.

It is not surprising that Elsevier wants to focus on the future rather than on the past. They are a signatory to the Committee on Publication Ethics, and the discovery that two of their journals have flouted numerous of the COPE guidelines is an embarrassment that could have commercial implications. But I'm afraid that, while I understand their position, I don't think this is good enough. Those who published good work in journals where the publisher failed in its duty of oversight deserve an acknowledgement that there were problems and an apology.

* Update 23rd March 2015: Data now added for Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders in a separate Excel file.