October 2, 2012
Scientific Fraudsters Peer Review Their Own Journal Articles
Favorable comments from peer reviewers are essential for
getting articles published in reputable journals. To assure that the
papers they submitted saw print, unscrupulous researchers have obtained
that all-important peer approval the easy way: by fraudulently writing
the reviews themselves.
Chronicle of Higher Education
(subscription required for this article) reports on scientists in South
Korea, China, and Iran who submitted papers to international journals
and gave fictitious e-mail addresses for the potential reviewers they
recommended to journal editors. In some cases, even the reviewers
themselves were fictitious. In others, the dishonest authors apparently
managed to enter and alter a journal's own database of real reviewers.
The
fake e-mail addresses routed the journal editors' requests for reviews
back to the articles' authors. In the guise of the being the reviewers,
the authors sent back comments positive enough to win publication. In
the cases the Chronicle cites, the journals discovered the fraud and retracted the articles.
"I find it very shocking," the Chronicle quotes
Laura Schmidt of Elsevier, the journal publisher. But this form of
fakery ought to be very easy to prevent with even minimal checking. My
experience tracking down academics for interviews shows that getting an
established academic's correct contact information is generally quick
and easy. Just about every university has an easily accessible online
directory, so ten minutes of an editor's time ought to suffice for
finding evidence that a suggested reviewer actually exists, as well as
his or her accurate e-mail address. Beyond that, social networking
sites such as LinkedIn can also provide ways of getting in touch with
people.
And editors do need to be vigilant these days. As another Chronicle article documents (subscription not
required), the great majority of journal retractions result from
misconduct rather than from honest mistakes. Citing an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (PNAS) the Chronicle notes
that the prevalence of wrongdoing is highest in the most prestigious
journals. "Right now we're incentivizing a lot of behavior that's not
actually constructive to science," says Ferric Fang, one of the PNAS atricle's
authors. That behavior is happening because hiring committees and
funding agencies tend to count, rather than to examine, applicants'
publications, Fang continues.
As the competition for academic
jobs and funding increases, so does the pressure to get articles
published no matter what. And the Internet obviously provides some
interesting opportunities for innovative cheating. That ought to put
journals on notice that they need to take the extra effort required to
give honest researchers a fair chance.
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