Readers who want a summary of editorial malpractice can read Professor Graff's article (Graff 2022). Herein I am going to concentrate on malpractice by authors. As the number of people wanting to publish in academic journals continues to rise, malpractice proliferates, in some cases to epidemic proportions. These are the forms it takes:-
- irrelevant submission (out of scope)
- plagiarism
- use of copyrighted material without the explicit permission of the copyright holder and author of the intellectual property
- duplicate submission
- false authorship
- improper use of people's names
- so-called "honorary" authorship
- papers written by surrogate authors or artificial intelligence
- falsification of data and results (mainly in the medical field)
- citation cartels
- other ethical violations (including political issues).
Irrelevant submission. This is not strictly malpractice. It usually represents a failure to consider what the journal would be willing to publish. Unfortunately its title is not a complete and accurate guide to the type of papers it includes. By virtue of their decisions about what to include in the periodical, and what to exclude from it, all managing editors and editors-in-chief have to define a profile for a journal. This is the only way to give it an identity and ensure that it is not overwhelmed by semi-relevant or irrelevant submissions. Journals do have widely varying policies about what they will include and how broad they will allow their scope to be. However, there is an increasing problem with submissions that are simply out of scope and should never have been submitted in the first place. Dealing with these manuscripts wastes everyone's time. In a high-volume journal probably more than a quarter of all submissions will fall into this category, and each manuscript will have to be individually rejected. A little more care in choosing a journal to submit one's work to would more or less solve this problem.
Plagiarism. There is a rapidly increasing problem with the misuse of other works, whether they be by the authors of a manuscript or by other writers. Editors and reviewers should demand that works are original in their prose, illustrations and data. This means significant divergence from what has gone before, not merely camouflaging someone else's ideas with slight changes in wording. Unfortunately, we live in an age in which there is an increasing tendency to write by copy-and-paste, lifting sentences and often entire paragraphs out of existing published works and plonking them directly into new manuscripts. A similarity score of 20% or more raises a red flag. There are, of course, exceptions in which the reuse of material is perfectly justified. Reusing material from pre-prints and working papers are usually acceptable, as they are not full, formal publications. Proper attribution of sources can help as well. However, plagiarism is on the rise and, despite the existence of powerful software to detect it, we simply do not know how much of it goes undetected. For example, direct translation of copyrighted material from one language to another will not be detected by the software.
Copyrighted material. Where sources are properly attributed, there is a widespread tendency to ignore the procedures of copyright release, in which permission to reproduce published material is obtained. Although there is a grey area regarding the amount or size of material for which permission must be obtained, there is nevertheless a clear obligation not to use, for example, a map published in another work, without permission.
Duplicate submission. It is standard practice in academic publishing to require authors to certify that their submitted manuscripts are not currently under consideration by any other journal, and that the material has not been published elsewhere. They can, of course, submit a paper elsewhere if it is rejected, but not before that has happened. The larger academic publishers are now introducing software that can detect duplicate submission, but unfortunately it can only do so within a single publishing house. For a large-volume journal, a significant number of cases of double or multiple submission may be discovered.
False authorship. It is possible that a paper be written by surrogate authors, or even, perhaps, with the contribution of artificial intelligence algorithms. That is a problem that publishers, editors and reviewers will increasingly have to confront in the future. Some of the larger academic publishers automatically verify authorship. This became necessary once it was realised that the names of (mostly eminent) scholars and scientists were being appropriated as putative authors of papers, usually without their knowledge. Another problem is so-called 'honorary authorship' (Al-Herz et al. 2013). In this, scholars are included as authors without actually contributing to the writing of the paper, or possibly even to the research on which it is based. In many cases, the real authors of the paper gain by associating their names with someone who is more prestigious in their chosen field than they are. Ethical considerations demand that authorship should mean exactly that, not merely bestowing kudos on someone else's work. In one case I recently encountered, the author of a paper was attempting to sell co-authorship in order to pay publication charges.
Falsification of data and results. This, of course, is the classic form of academic malpractice. When it is detected on an impressive scale the result can be a spectacular scandal. However, there is no way of telling how much falsification goes undetected. In certain sciences, the problem extends to clandestine image manipulation.
Citation cartels. It is sad to reflect that academic prestige is often judged using bibliometric measures. The number of citations of one's work is one such measure, usually expressed by the somewhat arcane h-index, which is supposed to be a measure of academic productivity. This presupposes that the work is popular and has had "impact". It ignores the question of whether the work has been cited because it is wrong, misleading or badly researched. Citation cartels are groups of academics who have arranged to cite each other's works in order to drive up citation indices. This detracts from scientific objectivity in their work and usually leaves a paper bloated with unnecessary, and perhaps irrelevant, citations.
Other ethical violations. A full range of ethical problems can be perused by looking at the website of COPE, the Committee on Publication Ethics (publicationethics.org). This includes a very large number of anonymised case histories in which an ethical determination was made by the Committee.
Despite the development of increasingly powerful software to detect malpractice, it is proliferating as more and more scholars seek to publish their work. For those who never make it into prestigious mainstream journals, there is a complete undergrowth of 'predatory' publishers and journals, whose standards are low (or even non-existent) and whose main raison d'etre is to make money, usually by charging authors to publish. Comprehensive lists of 'predatory' journals and publishers have been compiled by Jeffrey Beall (Beall 2022). Predatory publishing has in turn spawned a whole industry of predatory academic conferences and sham editorial boards (Stratton 2017).
In conclusion, there may be editors whose actions are questionable, but there are also many authors who do the wrong thing. If one examines one's motivations, procedures and experiences, it is perfectly possible to act with integrity and publish academic work while avoiding the whole malpractice problem.
References
Al-Herz, W., H. Haider, M. Al-Bahhar and A. Sadeq 2013. Honorary authorship in biomedical journals: how common is it and why does it exist? BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics 40(5): 346-348
Beall, J. 2022. Beall's List of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers. https://beallslist.net/ (accessed 30 December 2022).
Graff, H.J. 2022. Editors have become so wayward that academic authors need a bill of rights. 18 August 2022 Times Higher Education, London.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/editors-have-become-so-wayward-academic-authors-need-bill-rights
Stratton, S.J. 2017. Another “dear esteemed colleague” journal email invitation? Prehospital and Disaster Medicine 32(1): 1-2.
