A scholarly journal dealing with acoustics recently announced one of the largest mass retractions in the history of academia. Following the discovery that a Taiwanese scholar had set up over 100 fake accounts to game its peer review process, Journal of Vibration and Control and its publisher, Sage Publications, announced that it has retracted 60 papers submitted to JVC over a two-year period.
In 2013, the editor of JVC, Ali H. Nayfeh, became aware of people using “fabricated identities” to manipulate an online system called SAGE Track by which scholars review the work of other scholars prior to publication.
Attention focused on a researcher named Peter Chen of the National Pingtung University of Education (NPUE) in Taiwan and “possibly other authors at this institution.”
After a 14-month investigation, JVC determined the ring involved “aliases” and fake e-mail addresses of reviewers — up to 130 of them — in an apparently successful effort to get friendly reviews of submissions and as many articles published as possible by Chen and his friends. “On at least one occasion, the author Peter Chen reviewed his own paper under one of the aliases he created,” according to the SAGE announcement.
Sage and Nayfeh confronted Chen about the fake accounts, and contacted his bosses at NPUE after his responses proved unsatisfactory. Chen resigned in February 2014--apparently jumping before getting pushed.
Here's a list of the 60 articles. According to Sage, each of them had at least one author and/or one reviewer who was in on the ring.
In a follow-up story that ran in Friday's WaPo, Daniel Sherman, a spokesman for Sage, expanded more on Chen's tactics. In some cases, the names of the "reviewers" were real, but had been used to make up fake identities. In some cases, no affiliation was listed. Many of the authors listed on the papers had nothing to do with researching or writing them, and some of the reviews were written in as little as two minutes. Small wonder that WaPo's Fred Barbash thinks that this scandal "may very well go down in academic history as one of the most brazen on record."
Chen hasn't been heard from at all since this started. Given how egregious this is, I have to hope that he's brought up on criminal charges.