Peer-Review Fraud: Hacking the Scientific Publication Process

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In August 2015, the publisher Springer retracted 64 articles from 10 different subscription journals “after editorial checks spotted fake email addresses, and subsequent internal investigations uncovered fabricated peer review reports,” according to a statement on their website. The retractions came only months after BioMed Central, an open-access publisher also owned by Springer, retracted 43 articles for the same reason.

Charlotte J. Haug, MD, PhD, a visiting scholar at Stanford Health Policy, writes in this New England Journal of Medicine perspective that the pressure to publish is huge for scientists, what with rewards such as promotions and financial incentives. This is leading to a growing number of cases of plagiarism and errors.

"The pressure to publish is huge for scientists everywhere, and the competition for space in the best journals harder than ever," she tells Stanford Health Policy. "One reason for this is the rapidly increasing amount of research and number of researchers coming from emerging economies like Brazil, India, Turkey and China — to mention a few. When the rewards for publishing is also very high (promotion, money), one might be more willing to take some short-cuts to get published." Haug, who was the editor-in-chief of The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association and is a international correspondent for the New England Journal, said that as long as authors are rewarded for publishing many articles, and editors are rewarded for publishing them rapidly, new ways of gaming the traditional publication models will be invented more quickly than new control measures can be put in place. "Science is a collaborative endeavor," she said. "Not only in the sense that most scientific papers have a number of authors, but also in the sense that all science builds on previous science. One — or more — bad apple can have tremendously negative effects by leading other researchers in the wrong direction, wasting their time or directly harming for example patients that get the wrong treatment." You can read her full commentary here