Posted on 08/20/2015 7:52:15 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Springer Publishing, one of the world’s leading publishers of Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) books and journals, issued an announcement this week that 64 different professional articles, primarily in the medical field, had been retracted. It turns out that the vaunted peer review process, designed to ensure that multiple sets of experts evaluate the quality of the work before it hits the presses, had fallen apart. The peer reviews in some cases were found to be “highly suspicious” with bogus email addresses and questionable credentials.
Springer confirms that 64 articles are being retracted from 10 Springer subscription journals, after editorial checks spotted fake email addresses, and subsequent internal investigations uncovered fabricated peer review reports. After a thorough investigation we have strong reason to believe that the peer review process on these 64 articles was compromised. We reported this to the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) immediately. Attempts to manipulate peer review have affected journals across a number of publishers as detailed by COPE in their December 2014 statement. Springer has made COPE aware of the findings of its own internal investigations and has followed COPE’s recommendations, as outlined in their statement, for dealing with this issue. Springer will continue to participate and do whatever we can to support COPE’s efforts in this matter.
Retraction Watch (yes, that’s a real thing, apparently) has been covering related stories for some time now and reports that Springer is also the owner of BioMed Central Journals which retracted 43 papers earlier this year, also for fake peer reviews. That brings the total number for this one company to more than a hundred in a single year. Going further, Retraction Watch reports that there have been roughly 1,500 papers retracted across various science journals since 2012, with approximately 15% of them being for faked peer reviews.
You can see the list of the 64 recalled articles here and they are mostly from journals such as Molecular Neurobiology and Tumor Biology along with several others. Feel free to browse, but I’ll confess that I couldn’t even pronounce half the words in some of the titles. But it does beg the question of how many other science journals are quietly scotching published articles once they’ve been originally put out into the ether. And if the system was so easy to fool that people were allowed to offer their own peer reviewers and could throw the system off the trail with a devilishly clever idea like a fake email address, how solid is the rest of the data out there?
Just some food for thought.
They will be even more shocked when they examine the “peer reviewed” articles of the climate change “scientists”
lol
I note that the journal Climate Dynamics and several Climate Change books are part of the Springer Americas stable.
it’s all about grant money.........
When ever I point out that the scientists that support the claim that man is causing climate change are not experts in climate but experts in other fields like biology or archeology I am told I don’t know what I am talking about.. If you want to get a qualified peer reviewed article in a field it got to be mostly PhD in that field with a few PhDs in fields where you are using the science that comes from out side that scientists area of expertise. otherwise it is as good as getting the man on the streets opinion
The environmental science departments of college are filled with the same idiots that would take womens studies, or African American History or what not. They are not scientists, they are political hacks that would wash out of any real college program. And they have no interest in pursuing truth, they just want to push their agenda.
This is just one aspect of the corruption or weaknesses that exist in the research and peer-reviewed journal publication system. There are several problems that are largely ignored. There is fudging and falsification of the actual research. There is “piggybacking” of adding authors who did not contribute to the scholarship to the articles. There is exploitation of research worker bees by senior scientists. There is manipulation, intentional bias, and obnoxious elitism and gatekeeping (common, and it suppresses advancements) in the peer review system. There is even flat-out falsification of publication records by some researchers. I was informed of an “scholar” who simply copied an entire paper published in a highly reputable journal and published it under his or her name in another journal. Then there are a lot of journals that have uncertain peer-reviewer quality—some reviewers can barely read the papers but barf up a review and other reviewers provide ridiculous reviews that actually make the article worse. The process is quite weak.
Those who worship at the altar of the false god “Science” probably won’t have their faith shaken. And they won’t care as long as those grants keep flowing.
environmental science is not the study of climate......most liberals don’t understand that.
...it does beg the question of how many other science journals are quietly scotching published articles once they've been originally put out into the ether. And if the system was so easy to fool that people were allowed to offer their own peer reviewers and could throw the system off the trail with a devilishly clever idea like a fake email address, how solid is the rest of the data out there?
“A quick tour of any colleges “environmental science” department will quickly dispell any misconception they one might have that these are “scientists”.”
This seems to have been a long-term effect of the spreading of environmental studies programs and the infiltration of quackery into some environmental science programs. Traditionally, environmental studies programs covered sanitation and public health issues. Students were good analytical chemists, nurses, and physicians. Those programs, like that of the Coll of Public Health at the U of Iowa and others, were and probably still are good programs with good scientists. However, environmental science and environmental “studies” are not the same things. A good public health, biostatistics, and medicine/chemistry program is still a good field of study but programs outside that domain might be political or social vapor.
The flow of new drug approvals must continue nonstop without any barriers to profits.
This is simply fraud. Medical “research” has become a joke. Studies are cooked to make drugs with no measurable benefit over placebo (or worse) look effective. This started a long time ago but the corruption has bloomed in recent years. SSRIs were earlier examples of drugs without any better record than placebos having the data reworked after being rejected by the FDA and subsequently “discovered” to be efficacious after the exact same data is reevaluated. Drug companies were emboldened and by offering retirement jobs to FDA regulators they have entirely corrupted the process. The next step is that new drugs will be approved without even doing any clinical trials. The revolving door between the FDA and Pharma is as bad as the DoD/Defense Contractors’.
VERY interesting.
Indeed.
I only looked at the first page of retractions, but the scientists seem to be all Chinese, but am no expert on Chinese names.
“And if the system was so easy to fool that people were allowed to offer their own peer reviewers”
It’s not allowed, it’s mandatory.
When one submits a paper, you have to supply names of potential reviewers.
I always have hated that.
It seems to me the editors should know who would make good reviewers.
The authors shouldn’t be solicited for reviewers.
Great comment.
On the other side there are editors who only are doing it for their dossier and cv.
I am not sure the process is so weak as opposed to the people being corrupt and incompetent.
“I am not sure the process is so weak as opposed to the people being corrupt and incompetent.”
Thank you for the comment. The process and the people seem to fit together to produce some bad knowledge, it appears. As hard as it might be for some people to grasp, there are quite a few incompetent and corrupt people in the research and publishing system, as you point out.
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