Medical Writing Medical Education Peer review fraud

Volume 25, Issue 4 - Medical Education

Peer review fraud

Abstract

The hijacking of peer review by authors who create false referee profiles in order to deliver favourable reviews of their own work has received prominent recent coverage in several leading journals. At the time of writing, over 300 articles had been retracted by affected publishers, including the likes of Elsevier, Springer, and SAGE.

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References

  1. Ferguson C, Marcus A, Oransky I. Publishing: The peer-review scam. Nature. 2014;515(7528):480-2.
  2. Haug CJ. Peer-review fraud—Hacking the scientific publication process. N Engl J Med. 2015;373(25):2393-5.
  3. McCook A. Retraction Watch. What pub - lishers and countries do most retractions for fake peer review come from? 2016 [cited 2016 Oct 12]. Available from: http://retractionwatch.com/2016/09/27/what-publishers-and-countries-do-mostretractions-for-fake-peer-review-comefrom/
  4. Cohen A, Pattanaik S, Kumar P, Bies RR, de Boer A, Ferro A, et al. Organised crime against the academic peer review system. Br J Clin Pharmacol. 2016;81(6):1012-7.
  5. Lv MY, Deng SL, Long XF. Retraction. rhBNP therapy can improve clinical outcomes and reduce in-hospital mortality compared with dobutamine in heart failure patients: a meta-analysis. Br J Clin Pharmacol. 2016;81(1):174-85.
  6. No authors listed. Retraction: ‘rhBNP therapy can improve clinical outcomes and reduce in-hospital mortality compared with dobutamine in heart failure patients: a metaanalysis’ by Ming-Yi Lv, Shu-Ling Deng and Xiao-Feng Long. Br J Clin Pharmacol. 2016;81(5):1005.
  7. Wager E, Barbour V, Yentis S, Kleinert S, on behalf of COPE Council. Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Guidelines for retracting articles. 2009 [cited 2016 Oct 12]. Available from: http://publicationethics.org/files/retraction%20guidelines.pdf

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