Hindawi, an Open Access journal publisher once identified by Jeffrey Beall as a potentially predatory publisher and later labeled as a “borderline case” by Beall, has made great efforts to transform its reputation into that of a reputable, scholarly publisher. The publisher was purchased by Wiley in January 2021, and many hoped that the purchase would add a layer of trustworthiness and legitimacy to the once-questionable publisher’s practices. Recent developments have proved that the path toward implementing scholarly publishing best practices is a long, uphill struggle for Hindawi and Wiley.
In late March 2023, Clarivate removed 19 Hindawi journals from Web of Science when they released the monthly update of their Master Journal List. These 19 journals published 50% of articles published in Hindawi journals in 2022 (Petrou, 2023). The removal of these journals from Web of Science comes after Wiley disclosed they were suspending the publication of special issues due to “compromised articles” (Kincaid, 2023).
Web of Science dropped 50 journals from its index in March for failure to meet 24 of the quality criteria required to be included in Web of Science. Common quality violations included: adequate peer review, appropriate citations, and content that was irrelevant to the scope of the journal. The 19 Hindawi journals removed from Web of Science accounted for 38% of the total 50 journals removed from the index! Health sciences titles published by Hindawi that were removed from Web of Science include:
- Biomed Research International
- Disease Markers
- Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine
- Journal of Environmental and Public Health
- Journal of Healthcare Engineering
- Journal of Oncology
- Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity
The potential impact of this decision could be significant for authors. When a journal is no longer included in Web of Science, Clarivate no longer indexes the papers published in the journal, no longer counts citations from papers published in the journal, and no longer calculates an impact factor for the journal (Kincaid, 2023). Authors who publish in these journals will be negatively impacted as many universities factor in these types of metrics into promotion and tenure decisions (Kincaid, 2023).
This is just one of the more recent examples of the struggles Hindawi and Wiley have grappled with since Wiley purchased Hindawi in 2021. Last year, Wiley announced the retraction of more than 500 Hindawi papers that had been linked to peer review rings. Hindawi has also been involved in paper mill activity, publishing articles coming out of paper mills in at least nine of the journals that were delisted. Paper mills are “unethical outsourcing agencies proficient in fabricating fraudulent manuscripts submitted to scholarly journals” (Pérez-Neri et al., 2022).
In the early days of paper mills, plagiarism was the biggest concern. However, paper mills have become more sophisticated and are now capable of fabricating data, and images, and producing fake study results (Pérez-Neri et al., 2022). Pérez-Neri et al. reviewed 325 retracted articles with suspected paper mill involvement from 31 journals and found that these retracted articles produced 3,708 citations (Pérez-Neri et al., 2022). The study also found a marked increase in retracted paper mill articles with the number of paper mill articles increasing from nine articles in 2016, to 44 articles in 2017, 88 articles in 2018, and 109 articles in 2019 (Pérez-Neri et al., 2022). Nearly half of the analyzed retracted papers (45%) were from the health sciences fields (Pérez-Neri et al., 2022). In a pre-print analysis of Hindawi’s paper mill activity, Dorothy Bishop found that paper mills target journals “precisely because they are included in WoS [Web of Science], which gives them kudos and means that any citations count towards indicators such as H-index, which is used by many institutions in hiring and promotion” (Bishop, 2023).
Another model that has become popular among questionable journals is the “guest editor” model, in which a journal invites a scholar or group of scholars to serve as guest editors for a specific issue of papers on the same topic or theme. MDPI is another publisher once identified by Jeffrey Beall as potentially predatory and has made efforts to turn around its reputation and become known as a reputable scholarly publisher. MDPI has used the guest editor model to help grow its business. In a recent post in The Scholarly Kitchen, Christos Petrou wrote that “the Guest Editor model fueled MDPI’s rise, yet it pushed Hindawi off a cliff” (Petrou, 2023). According to Petrou, the guest editor model accounts for at least 60% of MDPI’s papers. Hindawi has also embraced this model in recent years increasing the number of papers published under the guest editor model from 17% of papers in 2019 to 53% of papers published in 2022 (Petrou, 2023). Hindawi’s use of the guest editor model contributed to its exploitation by paper mills, which lead to more than 500 retractions between November 2022 and March 2023 (Petrou, 2023).
MDPI was not left unscathed by Clarivate’s decision to delist 50 journals from Web of Science. MDPI’s largest journal, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH), which had an Impact Factor above 4.0, was among the titles delisted in March. IJERPH was delisted for publishing content that was not relevant to the journal’s scope. Petrou argued that while this is likely a problem for hundreds of other journals, Web of Science “sent a message by going after the largest journal of MDPI” (Petrou, 2023).
The guest editor model is no longer used exclusively by questionable publishers and has slowly been embraced by traditional scholarly publishers. Petrou encourages publishers interested in the guest editor model to implement transparent safeguards into this model to uphold editorial integrity. While the scholarly publishing landscape continues to evolve and formerly questionable publishers attempt to gain legitimacy and stabilize their reputations, we must remain vigilant in evaluating the journals in which we choose to publish. Likewise, scholarly publishers must address the research integrity of the articles they publish by ensuring safeguards are in place to prevent the proliferation of paper mill-produced papers from making it through the peer review and screening process and ending up as published papers in trusted journals, only to be retracted once they have been exposed as fraudulent.
References:
Bishop, D. V. M. (2023, February 6). Red flags for paper mills need to go beyond the level of individual articles: a case study of Hindawi special issues. PsyArXiv Preprints. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/6mbgv
Kincaid, E. (2023, March 21). Nearly 20 Hindawi journals delisted from leading index amid concerns of papermill activity. Retraction Watch. https://retractionwatch.com/2023/03/21/nearly-20-hindawi-journals-delisted-from-leading-index-amid-concerns-of-papermill-activity/#more-126734
Pérez-Neri, I., Pineda, C., & Sandoval, H. (2022). Threats to scholarly research integrity arising from paper mills: A rapid scoping review. Clinical Rheumatology, 41(7), 2241-2248. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10067-022-06198-9
Petrou, C. (2023, March 30). Guest post: Of special issues and journal purges. The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2023/03/30/guest-post-of-special-issues-and-journal-purges/?informz=1&nbd=c6b4a896-51b7-4c2b-abe8-f0c60236adc9&nbd_source=informz
