Phoney articles reflect flawed system

GERMAN PUBLISHER SPRINGER announced on Thursday it was retracting 107 articles that were published between 2012 and 2016 in its medical journal Tumor Biology, due to irregularities in the peer-review process for the articles, most of which were by Chinese researchers. Southern Metropolis Daily commented on Monday:

Albeit Springer's mass retraction of questionable papers is not new to Chinese authors, it sets a precedent regarding the number of simultaneously retracted papers, and is likely to deal a heavy blow to the image of China's medical researchers.

Springer said that the email addresses of the peer reviewers, normally distinguished experts in the same field, were fabricated, which put the peer reviews in doubt. A subsequent investigation discovered that the reviewers did not conduct any peer reviews, and it is possible that their names were used by some third-party agencies without their consent.