Yesterday I presented the first two themes of the STM conference in London on December 4, 2024. Here are the other themes:
Understanding the web : Exposing malicious networks of authors, reviewers, and citations.
There are networks of ‘bad actors’, and they are generally close, whether they are authors, proofreaders, or even newspaper editors. Models try to reconstruct these networks with generative AI, and we need to disentangle them. For example, the case of an editor-in-chief adding references to his own articles in the reviewers’ opinions… I had never heard of this practice! We have seen very impressive slides from authors and reviewers… Authors manage to be cited 500 to 1000 times by the reviewers’ cartel. There is a lot of manipulation at the level of special issues, with the ‘guest editors’. Editors have alarms and know who is submitting an article and if they are also reviewing an article… but these systems are not shared between publishers. Some comments from editors surprised to see that bandit researchers have promotions! ORCID has a lot of potential to identify real researchers…. Integrity has become an activity within publishers in a few years and there are more tools for detecting misconduct.
A session with sleuths. What are the new trends ? And how can publishers, editors and sleuths work better together ?
Session moderated by Jana Christopher (FEBS, Heidelberg) with famous speakers: Dorothy Bishop (Oxford) whose blog is brilliant. Cyril Labbé founder of the Problematic Paper Screener (Grenoble), Boris Barbour (PubPeer, Paris) and Nick Wise (Clare College, Cambridge). Cyril summarized the Paris meeting on the decontamination of literature in September 2024. It was a three-day meeting with ‘sleuths’ from various countries. There is a network that exchanges regularly. Were the participants prestigious and known in various fields for having read frauds in evidence? These experts are not research integrity officers. This community uses PubPeer a lot. Nick Wise mentioned paper mills and ‘co-author’ groups on telegram, whatsapp and other networks? He showed screenshots of these discussions to buy author positions… We described this on this blog. Scary slides were shown including a short video of an office of a paper mill company!!!! Rapid increases in articles in some journals should attract attention… Dorothy Bishop started by saying ‘this only happens in low profile journals, why worry’. She reiterated her October 16 open letter to Scientific Reports. She showed distorted phrasing, an important sign of problems in an article. Region under the bend for area under the curve! Highlighting 28 editors of Scientific Reports, who had suspicions of misconduct… Contamination of editors is problematic, because the journal is quickly contaminated. The advice to publishers to avoid paper mills is to be very careful when recruiting an editor (watch PubPeer, investigate their articles with PPS, cite the name of the editor who accepted an article (MDPI does this), publish the reviewers’ evaluations …. PubPeer was launched in 2012, and the progress discussed is impressive. Too many sleuths are isolated, and collaboration between them is beneficial. ‘the institution’. Questionable systematic reviews use questionable articles.
Discussion of a good article by Leonid Schneider ‘start a paper mill’ was recommended, and it is great! Presentation of a case where 8 authors were added during revision, without notifying the editor-in-chief.
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