GoKawiilReview-mill activity can go unnoticed for years and be tricky to spot, Bishop says. Moreover, many people engaged in such activity use identifiers from the PubMed biomedical-science database, rather than full references to make their citation requests, Bishop adds. This means that overworked editors might not recognize improper requests. People involved in review mills also escape detection by requesting that authors cite their collaborators’ papers rather than their own. This might have been the case with Börsch’s Reviewer 2: chemist Qaiser Mahmood at the Guangdong Laboratory of Chemistry and Fine Chemical Engineering in Shantou, China, who Oviedo-García found to have duplicated reviews. Nature journalists determined that the papers1,2 Mahmood asked Börsch and his colleagues to cite were co-authored by some of Mahmood’s collaborators. Altogether, Oviedo-García has identified 85 similar reviewer reports that Mahmood, his collaborators or anonymous researchers have written for various journals, requesting up to 54 studies to be cited. Mahmood did not respond to requests for comment about his and his collaborators’ review practices.
Suggesting that manuscript authors cite the reviewer’s collaborators’ papers rather than the reviewer’s own could be part of a quid-pro-quo dynamic in which those associates reciprocate in kind when they are reviewers, Bishop says. Such networks can grow into large review cartels. For example, Bishop and Oviedo-García identified a group of at least nine Italian oncologists who used similar review templates to get their work cited in 170 articles8. “In this mill, we’re pretty sure an editor is also involved, which helps them allocate papers to friends who will do this,” Bishop says.
Although journals are getting better at detecting review mills, it’s often thanks to science sleuths that journals — and authors themselves — are made aware of this activity. Börsch only learnt of Mahmood’s behaviour through Oviedo-García’s PubPeer post and her Scientometrics paper4, which lists 263 reviewer reports with evidence of review-mill activity. Börsch feels that by implicating his study in her paper about misconduct, he and his co-authors were being unfairly criticized even though he — and many others whose papers are included in Oviedo-García’s article — had rejected the reviewers’ citation requests.
Börsch asked Oviedo-García to remove any mentions of his study from her paper, but received no response. Oviedo-García, whose paper doesn’t mention Börsch’s study directly, says that she associated only reviewers with fraud or misconduct. “It is crystal clear stated in the article that the authors are not to blame,” she says.
Börsch asked the editor-in-chief of Scientometrics to retract Oviedo-García’s paper, but his request was declined. MDPI’s publishers refused to remove the yellow label plastered above the online version of his paper. Börsch has also contacted Mahmood, but did not hear back. He has e-mailed his funding agency to see whether there was anything they could do — all to no avail. “For my PhD student, it’s a disaster to have his first paper branded like this,” Börsch says.
When MDPI sent Börsch’s study to another group of reviewers — which it did without the authors’ permission — it seems to have sent out the original manuscript rather than the updated version, in which Börsch had responded to the helpful first reviewer, he says. When one of the new reviewers had an entire series of further requests, Börsch decided that enough was enough. In his view, the post-publication peer review unfairly placed the responsibility on him to correct the scientific record when it was the publisher’s responsibility to ensure that studies were vetted properly. He sees the extra peer review as a “smokescreen” to cover up MDPI’s failure to ensure adequate review. “At one point, I decided not to respond to any of their e-mails anymore,” he says.
To his fury, in June, a representative of the International Journal of Molecular Sciences asked Börsch and his colleagues for an update. If the journal didn’t hear from the authors soon, it “may have to withdraw the manuscript due to loss of contact”, they wrote.
When asked about Oviedo-García’s findings, an MDPI spokesperson says that since the Scientometrics paper4 the publisher has introduced measures to prevent similar issues from arising in the future. “We have strengthened oversight of the peer-review process to support robust editorial decision-making, and we are vigilant about monitoring all submissions for potential forms of reviewer misconduct.”
And when asked for comment on Börsch’s views, the MDPI spokesperson acknowledged the broader challenges of assigning blame when correcting the scientific record. “No system is entirely immune to error or systematic forms of misconduct,” they say. Moreover, post-publication actions such as corrections or retractions are crucial for maintaining the integrity of the scientific record, they add. “The purpose of post-publication notices is to inform readers in a clear and transparent manner, rather than to serve as a punitive measure.”
Finally, when asked about the suggestion that MDPI might retract Börsch’s paper, the spokesperson said that “retraction would only be considered in cases where the findings of an article are found to be unreliable, and this has not been the case in any of the investigations undertaken to date”.