The International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, published by Elsevier, announced the retraction of an article published in November 2024. The reason: the review process was compromised by the reviewers requesting the inclusion of references deemed redundant. Although peer-review manipulation and the addition of unnecessary citations are relatively common reasons for retractions, the case is unusual because it was the authors themselves who publicly denounced the paper, albeit inadvertently.
After changing the content of their article on the recommendation of the reviewers—a common step in the peer-review process—the authors chose to criticize the request to include new references, considering them superfluous. One of the paragraphs of the updated version of the paper stated: “As strongly requested by the reviewers, here we cite some references [35–47], although they are completely irrelevant to the present work.” The authors, however, did not expect the criticism to be included in the published article, which probably occurred due to carelessness on the part of the editors.
Qing-Miao Hu, a professor from the Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, and corresponding author of the paper, told Retraction Watch that he was surprised by the publication and that his group agreed with the retraction. The article was resubmitted to the journal and will be reviewed by other reviewers. It is suspected that the citations were being manipulated in favor of two Russian scientists whose names appear in the articles named on request of the reviewers. Publisher Elsevier continues to investigate the case.
The story above was published with the title “Paper retracted after authors criticize peer reviewers for pressuring them to include citations” in issue 351 of May/2025.
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