Sage has 467 articles from the Journal for intelligent and fuzzy systemsa title the company received when it acquired IOS Press for an undisclosed sum last November.

According to a spokesperson, the publisher launched “a thorough investigation” of the journal in April after indexing company Clarivate “informed us of concerns about the quality of some of the journal’s content.”

“The investigation found that the peer review process for some articles was inadequate, leading to the retraction of those articles,” the spokesman said.

The journal’s editor-in-chief, Reza Langari of Texas A&M University in College Station, resigned on June 16 “due to disagreements about how to proceed” with Sage’s investigation, he told Retraction Watch.

In Langari’s comments to us, he said the number of papers submitted has increased significantly in recent years due to the growth in the AI ​​field, which the journal covers, reaching 10,000 last year. The journal has implemented a pre-review process and rejected over 80% of submitted papers, he said, “some of which were clearly produced by paper mills or using AI tools.”

Time pressures and lack of responses from reviewers sometimes led to decisions about manuscripts being pushed to associate editors, Langari said. If he didn’t trust an editor, “I would fire him out of hand.”

He suspects that complaints from editors he had fired, or “disgruntled authors” he had placed on an “internal blacklist” of nearly 1,000 authors, or the large number of submissions to the journal may have contributed to Clarivate’s withdrawal of the journal.

Langari described Sage’s decision to withdraw over 450 articles “presumably due to short review periods or limited reviews” as “quite drastic.”

“The decision to remove so many articles may not have been entirely justified in my view,” said Langari. He was not involved in the final decision. “I appreciate that in their retraction notices they did not unfairly blame me, the editorial board and the authors,” he said.

At the start of the investigation, Sage suspended the publication of new articles in the magazine. According to the spokesperson, Sage will continue to maintain this suspension while the management of the magazine is transferred to the company.

The statement continues:

At Sage, we believe in the power of the scientific record and the importance of taking corrective action as we strive to maintain high quality standards for all our journals.

The journal’s profile page on Clarivate’s website states that indexing of the title in Web of Science is “on hold” while the company re-evaluates its content “according to our selection criteria.”

If Clarivate removes the journal from Web of Science, the company will no longer index its articles, stop counting its citations, and stop assigning an impact factor to the title, making the journal less attractive for researchers to publish their work. Universities and other institutions use citation metrics, as counted by indexes such as Web of Science, in hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, meaning researchers who have previously published in the journal will also pay a price.

Clarivate did not award the journal an impact factor in 2020 because of concerns about “citation stacking,” also known as participating in “citation cardels” or “citation rings.” In 2021, IOS Press withdrew nearly 50 articles from the journal because they “cited literature sources that are not related to the topic of the cited article,” the statement said. (Langari acknowledged this episode as a “mishap” in his 21-year tenure as editor-in-chief, which he said involved “special issues edited by supposedly trustworthy people as guest editors.” After that, the journal focused on regular submissions and stopped publishing special issues “unless it was under our control.”)

Sage had already been informed about the problems with the magazine before the takeover of IOS Press, a spokesman for the publisher explained:

For each new journal we add, we use our resources to ensure we publish to a high standard and in accordance with COPE. If there are issues with specific journals, we take corrective action where necessary.

The retraction notice for the articles cites “inadequate” peer reviews and states: “We have no evidence that the authors were involved.”

“The publisher thanks the anonymous volunteers on PubPeer whose observations complemented our internal investigation,” the statement said.

PubPeer user “Rhipidura albiventris” commented on several of the now retracted articles to point out errors in the calculations and question the relevance of the citations.

Even more articles were flagged via the Problematic Paper Screener, a project by detective Guillaume Cabanac that uses various detectors to identify bad practices in scientific articles.

According to Cabanac, the PPS has identified 11 articles in the journal that contain twisted language, that is, non-standard wording of common expressions that appears to have been written by computers. None of these flagged articles appear in today’s retraction notice.

The PPS “Feet of Clay” detector, which identifies articles citing retracted work, flagged 674 articles in the journal, not all of which were retracted in this batch.

Today’s retractions “will feed the feet of clay even more,” Cabanac told Retraction Watch, once the detector, which uses the Retraction Watch database, now part of Crossref, receives information about them from metadata providers. “We have to assess the domino effect.”

“Chain retractions” may be necessary if authors referenced the now-retracted papers using the “technique of citation plantation,” Cabanac said, meaning over-citing certain authors, even on unrelated topics. “I’m curious to see which journals will be most ‘contaminated’…”

How to use Retraction Watch? You can Tax-deductible contribution to support our workfollow us on Twitterlike us on Facebookadd us to your RSS readeror subscribe to our Daily overviewIf you find a revocation that not in our databaseyou can let us know here. For comments or feedback, please email us at (email protected).

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