Peer Review Ring Broken - 60 Articles Retracted

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday July 10, 2014 @04:21PM from the I-scratch-your-back-you-publish-my-paper dept.

blackbeak (1227080) writes The Washington Post reports that the Journal of Vibration and Control's review system was hijacked by a ring of reviewers. 60 articles have been retracted as a result. "After a 14-month investigation, JVC determined the ring involved “aliases” and fake e-mail addresses of reviewers — up to 130 of them — in an apparently successful effort to get friendly reviews of submissions and as many articles published as possible by Chen and his friends.'On at least one occasion, the author Peter Chen reviewed his own paper under one of the aliases he created,' according to the SAGE announcement."

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Not surprising by teakillsnoopy · 2014-07-11 02:54 · Score: 5, Interesting

I've been proofreading engineering/medical papers for universities in Taiwan for over 7 years and this is not surprising in the least. There is almost no stigma regarding plagiarism in this region (I've done work for Malaysian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, etc. authors). When I alert an author about copy/pasted text, their reaction is one you would get if you told someone that their reference format needs to be change. "Oh, ok. I guess I'll change it.". The universities here never seriously investigate plagiarism because all the big fish at the top did it themselves to get to the top.