107 Cancer Papers Retracted Due To Peer Review Fraud (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The journal Tumor Biology is retracting 107 research papers after discovering that the authors faked the peer review process. This isn't the journal's first rodeo. Late last year, 58 papers were retracted from seven different journals -- 25 came from Tumor Biology for the same reason. It's possible to fake peer review because authors are often asked to suggest potential reviewers for their own papers. This is done because research subjects are often blindingly niche; a researcher working in a sub-sub-field may be more aware than the journal editor of who is best-placed to assess the work. But some journals go further and request, or allow, authors to submit the contact details of these potential reviewers. If the editor isn't aware of the potential for a scam, they then merrily send the requests for review out to fake e-mail addresses, often using the names of actual researchers. And at the other end of the fake e-mail address is someone who's in on the game and happy to send in a friendly review. This most recent avalanche of fake-reviewed papers was discovered because of extra screening at the journal. According to an official statement from Springer, the company that published Tumor Biology until this year, "the decision was made to screen new papers before they are released to production." The extra screening turned up the names of fake reviewers that hadn't previously been detected, and "in order to clean up our scientific records, we will now start retracting these affected articles...Springer will continue to proactively investigate these issues."

Comments

There seems to be a clear pattern

[CustomSolvers2]

Most of (all?) the names of the authors of the last 107 papers seem Asian (Chinese?). And the Nature article about the previous 58 ones says that all of them were from Iran. These two issues are apparently confirming what seems the most probable reason for problems of this type (being discovered by the publisher): too permissive/greedy/keen-on-growing local authorities, universities or governments.

Oh Look...

[Anonymous Coward]

The list of authors with retracted studies looks like:

Zhang, J., Xu, F
Chen, X., Liang
Zhang, Y. & Liu, C.
Li, CY., Yuan, P., Lin, SS. et al.
Zhang, RC. & Mou, SH.
Dong, Y., Zhuang, L. & Ma, W.
Wang, J., Xu, Y., Fu, Q. et al.
Huang, Y., Liu, X., Kuang, X. et al.
Liu, C. & Wang, H.
Li, F., Liu, Y., Fu, T. et al.
Li, W., Wu, H. & Song, C.
He, J. & Xu, G.
Wu, D., Jiang, H., Gu, Q. et al.
Yin, Y., Feng, L. & Sun, J.
Xu, JQ., Liu, P., Si, MJ. et al.
Chen, H., Tang, C., Liu, M. et al.
Tian, X., Ma, P., Sui, C. et al.
Li, ZC., Zhang, LM., Wang, HB. et al.
Jin, B., Dong, P., Li, K. et al.
Sun, HL., Han, B., Zhai, HP. et al.
Xu, W., Wang, F., Ying, L. et al.
Luo, S., Guo, L., Li, Y. et al.
Chen, H., Zhou, B., Lan, X. et al.
Lv, S., Turlova, E., Zhao, S. et al.
Liu, C., Yin, L., Chen, J. et al. ...

But, you know, it's totally racist to say that there is a culture of dishonesty in China, and if you don't trust products of China to be what they say they are, you're a big bad racist.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[jedidiah]

Science today is having it's own religious fit of a protest march. it's truly fitting that this is being posted today. Science very much needs heretics. Zealots like Tyson and Nye don't help the cause of science by trying to be inquisitors.