Month: March 2023

Paper mill journals delisted from Web of Science, DOAJ

Retraction Watch reported that Web of Science (WoS) delisted 19 journals and 1 special issue published by Hindawi, 10 of which were also delisted from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). WoS-owner Clarivate withdrew 50 titles in the March update of journals it indexes after applying a new review process to detect journals that do not meet its 24 quality criteria. These include peer review, content relevance, citation practices and validity. Editors engaged with paper mills, organizations that charge authors to place uncorroborated or manipulated research in journals under their names, and did not put the papers through a peer review process. In the Scholarly Kitchen “Guest post – Of Special Issues and Journal Purges,” Christos Petrou discusses the publisher practice of using a scholar or group to edit an issue of papers on a specific topic which has fueled the growth of open access publishers Frontiers, Hindawi and MDPI and also exposed them to unethical editorial practices. However, the use of guest editors has increased across all journal publishers.

Wiley, which purchased Hindawi in 2021, temporarily suspended the publication of special issues between October 2022 and January 2023 and had retracted 500 papers in September 2022. As a result of Web of Science’s delisting of the 19 journals, their papers will no longer be indexed nor receive citation counts, and the journal will not be given an impact factor. These actions have negative consequences for authors of legitimate research in the journals whose work will be less discoverable and lack impact metrics they may count on for career advancement.

The 19 delisted Hindawi journals are:

  • Advances in Materials Science and Engineering
  • Biomed Research International
  • Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine
  • Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience
  • Contrast Media & Molecular Imaging
  • Disease Markers
  • Education Research International
  • Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine
  • Journal of Environmental and Public Health
  • Journal of Healthcare Engineering
  • Journal of Nanomaterials
  • Journal of Oncology
  • Mathematical Problems in Engineering
  • Mobile Information Systems
  • Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity
  • Scanning
  • Scientific Programming
  • Security and Communication Networks
  • Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing

The special issue was for Advances in Materials Science and Engineering.

Text recycling research project provides data on practices and guidelines

The Text Recycling Research Project (TRRP), funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is the first large scale, multi-institutional study of researchers’ reuse of their own textual material in different documents. Publications and practical resources (for researchers and editors) produced from the study contribute to an understanding of problematic practices and guidance for best practices.

The Project’s working definition of text recycling is:

“… the reuse of textual material (prose, visuals, or equations) in a new document where (1) the material in the new document is identical to that of the source (or substantively equivalent in both form and content), (2) the material is not presented in the new document as a quotation (via quotation marks or block indentation), and (3) at least one author of the new document is also an author of the prior document.”

“What is Text Recycling?“

The goals of the study were to survey text recycling in research, learn about beliefs and attitudes, analyze ethical and legal concerns, and create research-based guidelines and policies. Project researchers collected and analyzed text from 16 disciplines across science, technology, engineering, medicine, social sciences, humanities and arts by identifying the top 20 journals in each field. In addition, they worked with representatives from 74 journals, analyzed 316 responses to surveys, and interviewed in detail 20 editors. The first four years of the research were focused on professional research contexts, and now the investigators are examining classroom contexts. Resources for students will be forthcoming.

The study identified 6 misconceptions about text recycling (it’s a form of plagiarism, respectable scientists never do it, it’s unethical, etc.) and further distinguished between types of reuse (developmental, generative, adaptive and duplicate – see Understanding Text Recycling: A guide for researchers, p. 2). TRRP studied language used to describe these practices and offers standardized terms to promote a common understanding.