Elsevier pulls 500 research articles

fraud cheat

The world’s largest research publisher began investigating in the fall. Now they report plagiarism, fake conferences and fake peer reviews.

Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of scientific literature, recently announced that it is retracting at least 500 articles published in the journal. Today’s Articles: Actions.

This is what the Retraction Watch writeswhich closely follows research fraud.

The journal is a subsidiary use of the main publication material today, and is directed against publication of conference-related articles.

The reason many articles were pulled is mainly due to fake peer reviews, because many had indications that they were translated automatically or were written with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).

In addition, there are articles about fictitious events, conferences that have never been held before, both physically and digitally – so-called predator conferences – and articles from so-called paper mills.

I’m not surprised

This comes as no surprise to Jan Gunnar Bjålie, Vice Chair of the Audit Committee of the National Research Ethics Committees.

“Predator conferences are well known, and my research group and I are regularly invited to conferences in this category,” Lakhrono says.

He assumes that motivation is economic, that it creates noise, and that it is a growing problem, like predatory magazines, magazines that work frivolously, without peer review that work well.

Elsevier allowed guest editors to edit, and from quality control things got worse. What is unexpected is that it has hit the largest publishing house in the world.

“Opening up to guest editors is a common practice and has many upsides, but lead editors should always keep an eye on what’s going on. Here, Elsevier discovered a serious problem, but it came too late. It shows how easy it is to slip into the processes in which many people are involved. Actors, even for serious publisherssays Bajali.

Noisy but not destructive

investigations Today’s Articles: Actions It happened over the past year, but only in recent months has the publisher started pulling articles.

– What does that do with the credibility of the magazine, and the credibility of Elsevier?

– Publishers often have their own staff working with quality control, and they take this seriously, but something went wrong here, and rogue representatives were allowed into the magazine. Bialy says the publisher is open about what happened and is cleaning it up.

Therefore, Bjålie also thinks it’s not beyond the serious part of the post.

It is important to avoid such accidents. He adds that publishers, editors, and researchers who contribute peer reviews all contribute to maintaining the seriousness of the research and publishing the results.

1700 posts since 2020

So far, Retraction Watch has an overview of 17 articles from the journal in its database, mostly with Indian authors, but Elsevier has yet to report the results of its investigation. It can also take a quick time, because in the past two years alone, more than 1,700 articles have been pulled from Elsevier for various reasons.

Since it began in 2010, Retraction Watch has built a database of 35,000 articles. All these are not retracted articles, but also articles that have been corrected after publication.