An investigation by Nature’s journalism team identified a group of researchers who, while working as volunteer editors for the scientific journal PLOS ONE, were responsible for reviewing and approving a substantial share of articles later retracted for errors or misconduct. According to the report, five of these editors dealt with 15% of all the PLOS ONE articles that ended up being retracted. The findings include evidence of negligence and collusion that compromised the integrity of the review process and allowed for the publication of papers produced by paper mills—illegal services that sell scientific manuscripts, often containing fake data.
Renee Hoch, head of publication ethics for the PLOS family of journals, said she was aware of the problems. “We promptly removed the people of concern from PLOS editorial boards and took action as needed on the affected articles,” she told Nature. PLOS ONE is a mega-journal, a type of scientific journal that publishes a vast number of articles via open access on the internet and covers a wide spectrum of disciplines (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue n° 250). Founded in San Francisco by the nonprofit Public Library of Science (PLOS), it has thousands of volunteer editors who handle article submissions and oversee peer review, supported by 22 paid editors.
The five volunteer editors linked to the retractions have been banned from working with the journal. Top of the list is Shahid Farooq, a botanist at Harran University in Şanlıurfa, Türkiye. Between 2019 and 2023, he edited 79 articles published in PLOS ONE, 52 of which were later retracted. The retraction notices stated that the journal had concerns over authorship, conflicts of interest, and the integrity of the peer-review process. Farooq also coauthored seven articles published in the journal that were subsequently issued with identical retraction notices. He told Nature that he based his editorial decisions on reviewer reports and lacked the tools needed to detect conflicts of interest. He added that PLOS ONE removed him from its editorial board in 2022 and that he also resigned from editorial positions at other journals, such as Frontiers in Agronomy and BMC Plant Biology. “I no longer edit any paper for any publisher, as the publishers act as if they’re innocent once any issues are raised on the published papers,” he said.
Next on the list is Zhihan Lv (also known as Zhihan Lyu), a Chinese virtual reality expert who left Uppsala University, Sweden, last year. Between 2017 and 2021, he edited 54 PLOS ONE articles, of which 43 were retracted, 31 this year. In 2024, Neural Computing and Applications, a Springer Nature journal, retracted 24 of 26 papers in a 2018 special issue for which Lv was the guest editor. The articles, including one of which Lv himself was a coauthor, were retracted due to compromised peer review, irrelevant citations, image manipulation, distorted phrasing indicative of attempts to disguise plagiarism, and content outside the scope of the journal. Lv told Nature that at the time, he did not realize that there was a conflict of interest in submitting his own work to a special edition that he was editing. In 2022, PLOS ONE removed him from its team of volunteer editors.
The other editors named in the investigation were Haibin Lv, a marine geologist from China’s Ministry of Natural Resources (who is no relation to Zhihan Lv), Adnan Noor Shah, an agronomist from Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology in Rahim Yar Khan, Pakistan, and Aamir Ahmad, a doctor who taught at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, USA, for part of the period that he was an editor for PLOS ONE between 2012 and 2020.
Nature identified the five names by analyzing data from another study, published in PNAS by researchers from Northwestern University, USA, in August. The article revealed that paper mills rely on a complex system that includes journals and intermediaries who direct fraudulent or low-quality manuscripts to negligent or complicit publishers. The researchers examined 276,956 articles published in PLOS ONE between 2006 and 2023 and analyzed the performance of 134,983 authors and 18,329 volunteer editors. They found that just 45 of these editors were responsible for 30% of all retracted articles from the period, although they had only handled 1.3% of all papers published between 2006 and 2023. “The footprints that systematic fraud leaves in the literature are so massive that there is no way that it is just a couple of bad authors,” Reese Richardson, lead author of the PNAS study, told Nature. Richardson recently completed his doctorate at Northwestern University with a thesis on reproducibility, bias, and fraud in scientific production. To identify the five editors—who were not named in the original study—the team at Nature cross-referenced public data made available by PLOS ONE with retraction records from the Retraction Watch database.
“It is possible that some editors are being paid bribes,” Richardson said in an interview with the journal Science. “But it is also possible that informal arrangements are being made among colleagues,” he said, referring to the fact that authors often volunteer as editors and review one another’s submissions. The team from Northwestern studied the activities of intermediaries who arrange the publication of papers with dishonest journals and publishers. One of them, the Academic Research and Development Association (ARDA), based in Chennai, India, charges between US$250 and US$500 to publish articles in various journals, according to quotes obtained by Richardson. The company asks authors to submit their own manuscripts, an indication that it does not operate as a paper mill, but acts as a publication broker.
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