Frontiers “uncovers peer review manipulation network”

Frontiers says its Research Integrity Auditing team has uncovered a network of authors and editors who conducted peer review with undisclosed conflicts of interest and who engaged in citation manipulation. This has been confirmed in 122 articles published in Frontiers, across five journals, and has led to their retraction, says the publisher.

The team has further determined that the network has been active across multiple publishers, with more than 4,000 articles published across seven other publishers that, Frontiers says, justify further scrutiny.

The company states: “The investigation was initiated on the basis of concerns raised to our editorial office about undisclosed conflicts of interest in one article. At Frontiers, we publish the names of the reviewers for each accepted article, which allowed a reader to recognise that the peer review in this case might have been conflicted.

“In accordance with our policies, our Research Integrity Auditing team set out to investigate all previous submissions, publications and co-author networks of the authors. As the investigation proceeded, it became clear that a broad and sophisticated network of about 35 authors were potentially colluding over a very large number of journals and published papers, a fraction of which were published by Frontiers.

“Frontiers uses a combination of expertise and technology to ensure the integrity of our published papers. Our Artificial Intelligence Review Assistant (AIRA) was launched in 2018 and now includes over 50 verifications of submitted manuscripts. The majority of the retracted papers cited above were published in 2022; at that time, we did not have a check to verify the conflict of interest statements of the reviewers and handling editors. We have since taken necessary action to expand the scope of AIRA to include this in the recent release of its newest features.”

The retractions are currently underway and are expected to be completed by early August.

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