Hindawi and Wiley to retract more than 500 articles linked to peer review rounds – Are you happy with that?
Retraction Watch posted this a few days ago.
Selected sections of the article follow:
We asked what prompted the investigation. Bennett told us:
In April 2022, Hindawi’s Integrity Research team led an initial investigation into a Special Issue (SI) after a Chief Editor raised concerns about several articles published in there. The team decided to further investigate the contents of the journal. Through this investigation, the team highlighted an infrequent and disturbing pattern of reviewer activity and identified potential ‘bad actors’ present in many of these publications.
These concerns prompted the Publishing Insights and Research Integrity teams, enabled by recently enhanced analytics capabilities and a newly developed dashboard that provides views across all reviewer activity. , conducting a broader investigation to determine whether these bad actors are engaged in peer review manipulation elsewhere in the Hindawi portfolio.
After discovering that these bad actors were present in other journals, Hindawi management established a cross-functional working group that combined manual and data-driven investigations, resulting in the identify additional published articles.
At the beginning of August, Hindawi expanded the investigation with a combined investigative team that included Research Integrity experts, data and analytics experts, publishing and operations teams as well. as legal counsel from both Wiley and Hindawi. This team assessed due diligence on all potentially affected articles and manuscripts. This results in a list of ‘compromised’ reviewers and editors along with detected bad actors, identifying networks that exist between them, review activity patterns and detailed information. details of published articles and manuscripts at each stage of the review process that we may initially label as ‘infringing’. On September 6, the integrated investigative team began evaluating published articles, leading to the initial recommendation to withdraw 511 compromised articles based on reviewer activity alone. We hope the ongoing investigations will lead to the further withdrawal of the complaint.
and
He said the publisher had banned individuals its investigation identified, would contact integrity research officials or department heads as appropriate, and had shared its findings with groups. branch:
It is becoming increasingly clear to all involved in defending and investigating research integrity issues that closing down one publisher may just transfer the problem to another. We are committed to playing an active role in preventing that.
HT / Willis E. and Martin C
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