Did you notice that BioMed Central, a United Kingdom for-profit science publisher known for their open-access journal, retracted 43 papers?
The “retraction action” began in 2015 when BioMed staff members launched an investigation of 50 papers that seemed suspiciously flanked in fake reviews. Some of the reviews involved third-party companies selling their “review services.” The full list of 2015 retracted papers is available here.
Fake peer reviews are unfortunately a growing problem for publishers. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has been approached by a myriad of publishers concerned about fake reviews, citing manipulations from authors submitting their own fake reviews via pseudonym email addresses to authors purchasing “manuscript preparation services” complete with fake peer reviews. However, why authors are submitting fake reviews is just as pressing as tracking the how.
BioMed Central is far from the only publisher struggling with the fake review phenomenon. Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science covered the fake review self-submitted by author Hyung-In Moon in 2014. At the time, Moon was a medicinal-plant scientist at Dongguk University in South Korea. He had a paper published in The Journal of Enzyme Inhibition and Medicinal Chemistry in 2012, but the editors were alerted to potential fake reviews not because of the lack of review quality or grandiose claims—but simply because the reviews came in so quickly. Moon’s “reviewers” had an astonishingly fast 24-hour turnaround, which was a big red flag for the journal’s editor-in-chief, Claudiu Supuran.
Supuran confronted Moon, who quickly admitted that he’d written much of the reviews himself. Like many journals, Supuran’s was set up so authors can submit both their work and recommendations for potential reviewers via an online system. All an author needs to do is create a fake email address linked with a fake name, then “recommend” that pseudonym as a potential reviewer. Ultimately, Nature reports that Moon’s confession led to 28 papers in total retracted and one editor resigned over the debacle. However, Moon was simply confessing to a very flawed system and the obstacles authors face when charged with being wholly responsible for wrangling reviewers.
From 2012 – 2014, Nature reports that journals have retracted over 110 papers due to faked peer reviews. All took advantage of blatant vulnerabilities within digitalized systems for submitting papers and peer recommendations. Mark Dingemanse, linguist at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguists in the Netherlands, told Nature, “For a piece of software that’s used by hundreds of thousands of academics worldwide, it really is appalling.” Although Moon readily admitted to his “self-reviewing,” he also pointed out the obvious flaws in the computerized system. “Of course, authors will ask for their friends,” he said. According to Moon, it’s the jobs of editors to make sure reviewers aren’t from the same institutions as the author or, in some cases, obviously co-authors on the same paper.
Gray and Blurry Lines
From publishing giants like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer, SAGE and Wiley, and of course BioMed Central, it seems like no publisher is immune to the threat of the faked review. Elizabeth Moylan, senior editor at BioMed Central, says third-party agencies are able to offer extremely tempting “services” to authors. Not all faked reviews are as cut and dry as the Moon fiasco. By “offering language-editing and submission assistance to authors,” she says that it’s “unclear whether the authors of the manuscripts involved were aware that the agencies were proposing fabricated reviewers on their behalf or whether authors proposed fabricated names directly themselves.”
Some journals and countries are more prone to fake reviews than others according to a September 2016 research “Characteristics of retractions related to faked peer reviews: An overview” published in Postgrad Medical Journal. (Let’s assume the peer reviews for this research were 100 percent ethical!). Researchers looked at 250 retracted papers published by six publishers in 48 journals. The five journals with the most retractions included the Journal of Vibration and Control (24.8%), Molecular Biology Reports (11.6%), Immunopharmacology and Immunotoxicology (8.0%), Tumour Biology (6.8%) and European Journal of Medical Research (6.4%). The publishers included SAGE (31%), Springer (26%), BioMed Central (18%), Elsevier (13%), Informa (11%) and Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (1%). A minority (4%) of retracted papers were published in Science Citation Index (SCI) journals with an impact factor of >5.
Demands on Authors
The pressure on scientists and researchers to publish in peer-reviewed journals is intense. The National Institutes of Health covered a short and sweet piece from the Journal of Research in Medical Sciences in 2014 dubbed “Publish or Perish” by Seema Rawat and Sanjay Meena which highlights this intense pressure. (The original quip was coined by President Coolidge in 1932). In some cases, publishing in peer reviewed journals is tied (officially or not) to tenure and job security. The researchers note, “The increasing number of publication have led to rise in unethical practices, dubious research practices such as salami slicing, plagiarism, duplicate publication, fraud, ghost authors etc.”
With such otherworldly demands and seeming competition from fellow colleagues and researchers, some hopeful authors see faked reviews as the only option. In “Publish or Perish,” Rawat and Meena point out, “It is frequent to find that the head of departments and senior professors are producing a dozen publications in a year. This means that the person has conceived idea, submitted protocol, got Institutional Review Board clearance, done the research, wrote the paper and published it every month. It is virtually impossible for a human being to do this.”
Simultaneously, supply keeps pace with demand. According to data from clinicaltrials.gov, the volume of clinical studies for peer review has grown 28% per year for the past 17 years.
Quantity can often come at the cost of quality. Rawat and Meena say, “This pressure to increase the number of publications has led to unethical practices and waste full [sic] research.” No matter how niche or unique a research topic, its likely writers can find a publisher for it. “There is a ridiculous proliferation of scientific journals of all kind. Every other day we see a new journal cropping up.”
Band-Aid Fixes?
In response to the abuse of electronic manuscript submissions, some publishers including BioMed Central have disabled automatic peer review requests from authors. Instead, BioMed Central allegedly asks for peer review email addresses in the author cover letter, but this cannot be confirmed. Currently, the BioMed Central website can be viewed here.
However, disabling automatic requests for peer reviews and replacing the approach with having editors email potential reviewers directly seems unlikely to do much to curb the depressing incidence of fake reviews. Will supplying faked email addresses, or emails of friends and third party vendors, directly to an editor instead of entering it into an automated system make authors think twice about their ethics?
On behalf of every physician and patient it better. If not, then the entire system has very deep problems.
The current state of publisher vetting potential reviewers is a fragile one. Savvy editors know the red flags—such as unreasonably fast reviewer turnarounds (as with the Moon case). However, that’s not necessarily a sign of a faked review. Sometimes the author may have given reviewers a generous heads-up about the request and the reviewer had responses ready. Perhaps the reviewer had already penned a review for the author’s submission to another journal, and simply swapped out the salutations. Editors are also watching for email addresses that seem personal and aren’t linked to an institution, though again that isn’t a sure sign of a faked review. Plus, it’s very possible that the author is asking a friend who happens to be at an institute for a so-called “review.”
Ultimately, the dirty work will be left to editors and journals who are charged with confirming the integrity of every manuscript they publish, from ensuring lack of plagiarism to reputable reviews. At the same time, taking steps to actively discourage authors from such shortcuts can also play a role. What happens to an author like Moon who’s caught faking reviews? Usually nothing, save for a bit of shame and embarrassment. With so many publications available, even if an author is banned from submitting to one journal (which is on a case by case basis), there are plenty of other journals the author can submit to in the future. The feasibility of taking serious action against an author caught manipulating the system is questionable, and would require the banding together of publishers on at least a national if not international scale. However, such an undertaking may eventually lead to a lighter load for editors charged with keeping an eagle eye on all submissions.
Faked reviews, at first blush, may seem an obvious ethical faux pas. However, why would an author—usually a scientist, researcher and doctor who has dedicated their life to study and science—take such a shortcut at the tail-end of a massive undertaking like a research paper? Perhaps faked reviews are the inevitable side effects of a flawed system that demands too much while offering up a desired path that’s just too tempting to overlook.
