We didn't get it retracted

Stumbling into a paper mill

For better or for worse, not many behavior-analytic papers have been retracted. We had been thinking about several examples (an author accused of excessive self-citation and peer-reviewing his own work; an article produced with AI, complete with fake citations; some authors who posted FaceBook comments without permission) and had a look around RetractionWatch’s invaluable database.

There weren’t many. But then, we noticed something interesting in a few retractions for Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders:

Three articles, published in the span of 1 month in 2023, and they had…a “rogue editor”?

We had to know more.

***

A rogue editor, somehow responsible for publication of multiple retracted articles – surely it had to be the same rogue editor, or could there be multiple rogue editors – could we find out who?

The notice posted to the articles, as you might expect, didn’t name names. But it did give a clue.

A guest-edited issue generally credits the guest editor. But a Google search puts us two steps forward and one step back: as reported in The Transmitter, at least 11 articles from this guest issue were retracted, and the issue was never published – there would be no masthead with credit.

What was wrong with these articles?

***

The articles can be found on the JADD website by searching the title of the special issue: “Impact of Assistive Technology in Special Education.”

Here’s one: Study on the Impact of Inherent Ability on the High Quality of Life

in the Elderly Based on Mediating Effect of Value Participation. Right away, the title is the type of nonsense that comes from a paper mill. Looking at the paper, problems jump right off the page:

Ah yes, the two sexes: “the male sex” and “Femininity.”

As we sorted through the retracted papers, there was apparently one slated to appear in the special issue that was not retracted. Was this paper genuine?

Still, the author is from China; perhaps their English skills are imperfect (even though they work at the “School of Foreign Languages”). Is it reasonable to judge a paper written in what might be their second, third, or fourth language?

Towards the bottom of the paper, the author attributes funding to the following grant:

It turns out that Yanqi Guo “published” another “paper,” entitled University Classroom Teaching Model Based on Decision Tree Analysis and Machine Learning, and the funding attribution reads as follows:

(The editor for this special issue is not “Chin-Ling Chen” (from the screenshot above), but Xingsi Xue. Google “Xingsi Xue special issue” and find that he edited a special issue for MDPI, Evolutionary Intelligence, Intelligent Computing, OBM Genetics, Security and Communication Networks (all articles retracted), Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, and Computers, Materials & Continua. This is foreshadowing.)

These papers are slop that could never make it through a genuine peer review. But since the special issue in JADD wasn’t published, where can we find the editors?

A special issue will typically have a call for papers.

***

We started clicking through the JADD website on the Wayback Machine, but it turns out that the call for papers is still live. The call for papers doesn’t look unusual – but if you actually read it, the language is stilted and sloppy. It lists three co-editors:

• Dr. Elena Verdu - Universidad Internacional de la Rioja

Logroño, Spain

• Dr. Yuri Vanessa Nieto - Universidad Nacional Abierta y a Distancia

UNAD, Bogotá, Colombia

• Dr. Nasir Saleem - University of Engineering and Technology,

Peshawar, Pakistan

Googling any of their names returns a surprising result: they have co-edited several special issues of journals together.

• Cloud Computing and Big Data for Cognitive IoT, Big Data

• Big data and artificial intelligence in earth science, Acta Geophysica

• Multi-Lingual Representation of Natural Language Processing for Low Resource Asian Language Processing Systems, ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing

• Our favorite JADD special issue

Skimming articles from these issues, it doesn’t look like there are any retractions. Rather, the journals appear low-quality, and the papers are all borderline gibberish.

How is this happening?

***

Looking through the career of each editor, Googling associated authors and co-authors, we find that Elena Verdu has published several papers with Ruben Crespo. In a PubPeer post, we find someone mentioning Crespo specifically – and we find he has perhaps dozens of retracted papers. He is even a co-author on a retracted JADD article from the special issue!

He is mentioned in an interesting article here, and an Undark investigation here. While Crespo himself disagrees with the conclusions, here is what appears to be happening as described in these articles:

1. A “paper mill” churns out barely-believable “research” papers;

2. A team of researchers secretly collaborates with the paper mill; 

3. The researchers pitch random journals with ideas for a “special issue”;

4. A few journals accept the offer, offloading all work to the guest editors;

5. The guest editors and paper mill sell papers and authorship slots in their special issue

Someone identified this scam as early as 2020; perhaps it has been known about for even longer.

An uglier aspect of this scam is noted by El Pais: a researcher was asked to put his name on a paper without working on it, and told that his name was simply to ensure that all the names on the paper were not Chinese or Indian, making it more likely to be published. It is likely that some of these “legitimate” researchers who allow themselves to be credited gain prominence in a “publish or perish” metric, while some just gain money.

***

In the final dead ends of researching this article, we came across a PubPeer post that flagged the Yanqi Guo paper in 2024. The poster wrote that multiple articles in the special issue had been retracted, and notes the following:

From the abstract:

We have emailed all the journals with special issues from these authors (and at least 1 university), and the “special issue” editors themselves, attempting to summarize the issues in 2-3 sentences. Something interesting happened.

The editor of JADD, within 24 hours, replied that they forwarded our message to the publisher’s ethics committee. (This was 2 weeks ago and there is no indication that anything has happened, but we did get a nice reply.)

None of the other editors responded.

None of the “special issue” editors responded, either.

This is a logical conclusion for most of these slop journals. The articles were all published, and nobody, not even the journal editors themselves, read them. This is by design: these journals are pay-to-play affairs, not intended to be consumed. The editor of JADD responded because, in our estimation, it is not a slop journal.

The rise of AI will accelerate the current state: AI generated articles, published on quickly generated websites of AI generated journals, used as a source of author credits on AI generated CVs.

We hypothesize that this will have a dual effect: some people will go all-in on slop, understanding that most people won’t know the difference. Legit authors will increasingly be pushed into publishing in the most well-recognized journals, as any second-tier publications will sound suspect. Some of these high-quality second-tier publications will be forced to close.

Ultimately this will lead to a consolidation of authority, with a corresponding explosion of slop.

***

Schlitz beer was once America’s #1 beer brand. The CEO made changes in an effort to squeeze out more profits. First, cheaper versions of ingredients. Then, shorter brewing times. The short fermentation left the beer cloudy. They added silica gel to prevent cloudiness. The changes, one by one, didn’t lose them many customers. Then something happened: sitting on shelves, the beer ingredients separated and settled. In some cases, it looked like “snot” at the bottom of the bottle.

When the quality is bad enough, people will notice. And when was the last time you drank a Schlitz?

***

In a strange irony, brands will have to be on the front lines of the slop battle. Brands, despite their killer Twitter jokes, are not our friend. But for every slop paper published to an ostentatiously branded Springer page (and that is what Springer does with their journals), that Springer branding might gain a bit of tarnish.

Currently some of these brands publish hundreds of journals – too many to realistically monitor. It must make them a lot of money, for now. In the long term, the acceleration of slop and consolidation of authority will lead to extreme brand differentiation. Some will be seen as low quality.

Springer, Elsevier, Sage, Wiley – how long will any of them last when the snot settles?