Dive Brief:
- The Journal of Vibration and Control, the victim of a scheme to rig its peer review process, has issued a mass retraction of 60 articles.
- The journal, part of the SAGE group of academic publications, issued the retraction after a 14-month investigation uncovered a ring of up to 130 peer reviewers who used fake identities, the Washington Post reports.
- The goal of the ring was to create friendly reviews for articles by Peter Chen, a researcher at the National Pingtung University of Education in Taiwan, and his friends. At least once, Chen even reviewed his own paper using a peer review alias.
Dive Insight:
Is this a fraud issue that could be facing other academic journals? The editor-in-chief of the journal, Ali Nayfeh, resigned in May, and Chen resigned from the Taiwan university in February. Topics covered by the journal include “vibration and control of structures and machinery, signal analysis, aeroelasticity, neural networks, structural control and acoustics, noise and noise control, waves in solids, and fluids and shock waves.”