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Peer Review Report is listening. |
Unscrupulous authors have abused the peer review system, leaving it contaminated with articles that fall well short of the normally high standards for scientific publication, according to Irene Hames, PhD, of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). "The literature is polluted," Hames told an audience of several hundred editors and publishers gathered Sunday night at a Chicago hotel.
Hames spoke near the end of a day that offered a succession of well-researched studies documenting the violation of publishing taboos. One study examined fraudulent authorship, one study looked at duplicate publication, one looked at retractions, while 2 looked at plagiarism. All studies were presented as part of the
Seventh International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication, cosponsored by
The JAMA Network and
BMJ.
As an example of literary pollution, Hames mentioned a 2012 episode involving fake reviewers. Normally, science journal editors ask authors to suggest peer reviewers for their articles. In this case, the authors suggested the names of well-known colleagues, but supplied fictitious email addresses. The email addresses could be monitored by the authors, who intercepted the papers. "They made up the reviewers' names, and they reviewed the papers themselves," Hames explained. Fallout from this episode has spread "across countries, across journals, across disciplines," she continued. "One author has had 28 papers retracted. . . ."
Hames said afterward in an interview that COPE has no enforcement powers with which to punish polluters. However, in an effort to detoxify the literature, Hames unveiled a new and improved database of 500 publication ethics cases that, she says, can be used to provide much-needed training to newly hired life science editors. Every case within the database has been reclassified and recoded. "We've done this so we can characterise cases more comprehensively -- and to aid searching -- and look for trends that can help inform updating of COPE's current guidelines and resources, and the development of new ones," Hames wrote in an earlier email to Peer Review Report.
The 3-day congress continues Monday with 7 studies on bias, 3 on trial registration, and 4 on data sharing and accessibility. The day will conclude with the annual EQUATOR lecture by Kay Dickersin of the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Be sure to follow
@BELS_Editors on Twitter for congress updates. All tweets will be aggregated at #prc7.