Log in
I have had some problems with the journal Scientific Reports over the years, and I'm not alone. At the same time, I've read some interesting and useful papers published there as well. But worthless/faked manuscripts showing up in a journal tend to contaminate everything else that shows up there, which is a problem that you'd hope that scientific publishers are concerned about. To put things in the style of my late father, his one of his analogies was that if he had a gallon of urine and put a shot glass of wine into it, he still had a gallon of urine. On the other hand, if he had a gallon of wine and put a shot glass of urine into that, he now had a second gallon of urine. That's the problem.
This open letter, signed by many well-known literature fraud experts, is (to me) more than enough evidence that Scientific Reports has some serious problems with the papers it's letting through, and that the publishers (Springer Nature) are not doing enough to address them. It shows numerous examples of papers with odd and questionable references in them and with phrases that are redolent of (unstated) chatbot use, those apparently in attempts to bypass automated plagiarism-detection software. The authors of the letter note that even when the editors have taken action, that can be just to republish the same paper with slightly altered phrases:
A striking example cropped up last week when a “corrected” version of an article was published in Scientific Reports. This article had been flagged up by Guillaume Cabanac as containing numerous “tortured phrases” that are indicative of fraudulent authors attempting to bypass plagiarism checks; the authors were allowed to “correct” the article by merely removing some (not all) of the tortured phrases. This led some of us to look more closely at the article. As is evident from comments on PubPeer, it turned out to be a kind of case study of all the red flags for fraud that we look for. As well as (still uncorrected) tortured phrases, it contained irrelevant content, irrelevant citations, meaningless gibberish, a nonsensical figure, and material recycled from other publications.
As the letter goes on to note, deploying more AI and automated systems is not going to be enough to fix this problem. Actual humans are going to have to hit some buttons here, and some of those buttons need to be labeled "delete". The journal needs to show what editors handle each paper (which is currently invisible), because it's likely that a small number of them are responsible for an outsize fraction of the problem. And Springer Nature needs to take more robust steps when junk papers, junk beyond the shadow of a doubt, are brought to their attention. There is just no way that some of these things could have passed any honest, competent human peer review without being flagged. The reviewers - if there are any - who have let these things be published need to be flagged themselves.
Let's see what sort of response this gets. And by reponse, I don't mean a statement of concern or a bunch of platitudes about the scientific literature. Actions, not words, are what is needed here. Scientific Reports already has a few too many words in it as it is.
