Publisher Taylor & Francis announced that one of its journals, Bioengineered, will temporarily stop accepting and reviewing submissions for publication. During the pause, the company will investigate reports that more than 1,000 articles published in the journal contain falsified results or manipulated images. Evidence of problems in a large number of articles in the journal was presented by scientific integrity expert René Aquarius of Radboud University Medical Center, the Netherlands, in a study posted on a preprint server in March.
Aquarius examined some 900 articles published in Bioengineered between 2010 and 2023 and found signs of image duplication or manipulation in a quarter of them. Many appear to have been produced by paper mills (illegal services that sell scientific papers, often containing falsified data). In April, the journal was removed from the Web of Science database for failing to meet its quality standards.
Taylor & Francis said it has flagged suspected articles indicating that they are under investigation. For some of them, multiple requests were made during peer review to add new authors, a sign of potential sale of authorship. Aquarius welcomed the halt in submissions. “It is a problem that can be fixed, and it is good to see people and organizations taking responsibility when things go wrong,” he told Science.
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