Étiquette : M. Ángeles Oviedo-García

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Gaming the peer review system: Evidence for a review mill in medicine highlights the need to ensure reviewer integrity

Authors : M. Ángeles Oviedo-García, René Aquarius, Dorothy V. M. Bishop

Background

Review mills are recognized when individuals generate numerous generic review reports, typically containing suggestions for citations to their own work. Here, we report a network with characteristics of a review mill in the field of gynecological oncology.

Methods

Our search started with a review that contained “boilerplate” comments as well as suggestions that specific PubMed IDs be cited. We searched the internet using Google for review reports using the same boilerplate comments. We coded text to quantify similarities between reviews and compiled citations suggested by reviewers. For comparison, we analyzed 59 reviews of the same articles by other peer reviewers.

Results

We identified a network of 195 review reports that shared boilerplate text from 170 articles. One hundred and eighty-six reports suggested citing articles coauthored by a member of the network. Five members of the network had editorial roles. Authors of 142 articles complied with suggestions for citation. Boilerplate text and citation recommendations were rare in the comparison reports.

Conclusions

Review mills lead to articles being published without proper peer review. This is of particular concern in medical research. Open peer review and transparent reporting of the editors responsible for handling papers will make it easier to detect review mills.

URL : Gaming the peer review system: Evidence for a review mill in medicine highlights the need to ensure reviewer integrity

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2026.2640012

Catégories
EN

Journal citation reports and the definition of a predatory journal: The case of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)

Author : M. Ángeles Oviedo-García

The extent to which predatory journals can harm scientific practice increases as the numbers of such journals expand, in so far as they undermine scientific integrity, quality, and credibility, especially if those journals leak into prestigious databases.

Journal Citation Reports (JCRs), a reference for the assessment of researchers and for grant-making decisions, is used as a standard whitelist, in so far as the selectivity of a JCR-indexed journal adds a legitimacy of sorts to the articles that the journal publishes.

The Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) once included on Beall’s list of potential, possible or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers, had 53 journals ranked in the 2018 JCRs annual report.

These journals are analysed, not only to contrast the formal criteria for the identification of predatory journals, but taking a step further, their background is also analysed with regard to self-citations and the source of those self-citations in 2018 and 2019.

The results showed that the self-citation rates increased and was very much higher than those of the leading journals in the JCR category. Besides, an increasingly high rate of citations from other MDPI-journals was observed.

The formal criteria together with the analysis of the citation patterns of the 53 journals under analysis all singled them out as predatory journals. Hence, specific recommendations are given to researchers, educational institutions and prestigious databases advising them to review their working relations with those sorts of journals.

URL : Journal citation reports and the definition of a predatory journal: The case of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvab020