Scientific Reports, a journal published by Springer Nature, has been criticised for publishing fraudulent research in an open letter signed by many well-known experts in research fraud. The letter highlights multiple cases where papers have passed peer review despite containing glaring issues, from irrelevant references and ’tortured phrases’ to nonsensical figures.
The signatories of the letter, including well-known science sleuths Elizabeth Bik, Dorothy Bishop and Guillaume Cabanac, express disappointment over Springer Nature’s inadequate response to reports of flawed publications. One notable example cited involved a recently corrected article that had been flagged for containing numerous ‘tortured phrases’, indicative of attempts to bypass plagiarism detection. ‘For it to be negligence would require a remarkable degree of professional incompetence from a handling editor,’ wrote the authors.
Since 2014, Scientific Reports has seen 3702 articles flagged for containing tortured phrases. Over the same period, 262 articles have been retracted, according to a database managed by Retraction Watch, which records why papers are retracted. ‘They’ve published 23k papers in 2024 with article processing charges of £2090, raising £49 million from this journal alone,’ says Bishop. ‘So they should be able to put resource into cleaning this up.’
By comparison, PLOS One, another large open-access journal publishing over 14,000 articles per year, has retracted nearly 500 papers over the same time period, according to the Retraction Watch database.
This discussion comes at a time when retraction rates across scientific journals are climbing, adding to the urgency of identifying and reporting research misconduct, including data manipulation and authorship fraud. The retraction rate for European biomedical-science papers showed a fourfold increase between 2000 and 2021, 67% of which were attributed to research misconduct, including data manipulation and authorship fraud. Another Springer Nature journal, Optical and Quantum Electronics, has retracted over 200 papers since the start of September.
While this increase in retractions can reflect growing cases of misconduct, it could also be explained by improved detection and reporting capabilities. The presence of such a substantial number of flagged articles raises serious questions about the journal’s editorial standards and peer-review process, the authors of the open letter state.
The letter urges Springer Nature to take immediate action to address these concerns, including ‘[employing] a task force of people with the necessary expertise to carry out an urgent audit of all the [academic] editors of Scientific Reports’, the authors write. ‘Detection of problematic articles and editors could be helped by requiring open peer review for all journals,’ the authors advise.
Scientific Reports was approached for comment but none was provided by the article’s deadline.
Open letter from fraud sleuths raises concerns over research integrity at Scientific Reports | News
