The latest science scam: Peer-reviewing your own paper
http://ottawacitizen.com/technology/science/the-latest-science-scam-peer-reviewing-your-own-paper
A few professional scientists have found a sneaky way to cheat their way up the career ladder: They evaluate their own research by pretending to be someone else.
Scientists publish their research findings through academic journals, which check the work with independent experts before running with it.
This independent checking is called peer review. But journals have retracted dozens of research papers in recent months after learning that peer reviews were faked.
In Pakistan, for example, one economist has been named and shamed for faking positive reviews on 16 papers printed by the giant publishing company Elsevier.
The practice has moved the issue of research fraud out of the realm of shadowy, “predatory” websites that print anything for money and squarely into the mainstream of academic publishing.
Here’s how the scam works.
Suppose you’re a scientist and you do some research. You want a journal to publish it. And the journal asks you who has the expertise to do the peer review.
Everyone knows Prof. Smith is the go-to expert. The problem is, he or she might not like your work. So you set up a fake email account, using a slight tweaking of Smith’s name or university, and you ask the journal to send your work there for review. The editor agrees.
Now you have the keys to the bank, so to speak. You can review your own work, pretending to be Prof. Smith. And since peer review is often done anonymously, poor old Smith will never know a thing.
The scam is rare among the more than one million research papers published each year. But organized agencies have begun marketing fraudulent peer review as a commercial service to scientists who aren’t able to fake it themselves, according to the Committee on Publication Ethics, an international body that supports academic journals.
The committee has issued a special warning, saying it “has become aware of systematic, inappropriate attempts to manipulate the peer review processes of several journals across different publishers. These manipulations appear to have been orchestrated by a number of third-party agencies offering services to authors.”
It says evidence “suggests that some agencies are selling services, ranging from authorship of pre-written manuscripts to providing fabricated contact details for peer reviewers during the submission process and then supplying reviews from these fabricated addresses. Some of these peer reviewer accounts have the names of seemingly real researchers but with email addresses that differ from those from their institutions or associated with their previous publications, (while) others appear to be completely fictitious.”
How bad is it?
Retraction Watch, an independent blog that tracks retractions both for innocent mistakes and for misconduct, says it has found more than 100 papers with faked peer reviews.
A single (major) publisher, BioMed Central, found more than 50 cases. One journal on sound and acoustics, Journal of Vibration and Control, retracted 60 from a single author who had used 130 email accounts.
Two more cases popped up in December. The journal Medicine announced in each case: “A review, based on which the editorial decision had been made, was found to be falsified. Using a fictitious account, a review was submitted under the name of a known scientist without their knowledge. Consequently, the Editor supervising the review process was misled.”
Bruce Dancik is the editor-in-chief of Ottawa-based Canadian Science Publishing. He first heard of the practice at a conference last year.
“The person from a medical journal who first caught this came up (and described it). We all had quite a chuckle and wondered: ‘How could this happen?'”
That case was detected “because the author was stupid enough to return (complete) a review within 24 hours. And it never happens that fast. Never, ever happens. And it was a glowing review, which caused them to look extra hard. . . . We couldn’t believe the chutzpah of the author.”
Mostly he believes the scam is hitting medical journals. But he has also warned the editors of his company’s 16 journals to watch for it.
Retraction Watch advises editors to be “alert but not alarmed” because the practice is not widespread.
tspears@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
