A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of allegedly fabricated peer reviews.
The UK-based publisher BioMed Central put out 277 peer-reviewed journals.
A partial list of the retracted articles suggests 41 of them were written by scholars at universities in China, including China Medical University, Sichuan University, Shandong University and Jiaotong University Medical School.
Meanwhile, the Committee on Publication Ethics, a multidisciplinary group that includes more than 9,000 journal editors, issued a statement suggesting a much broader potential problem.
Those journals are now reviewing manuscripts to determine how many may need to be retracted, it said.
Peer review is the vetting process designed to guarantee the integrity of scholarly articles by having experts read them and approve or disapprove them for publication.
However, its system nowadays has come under scrutiny in recent years for a host of flaws and irregularities, ranging from lackadaisical reviewing to cronyism to outright fraud.
Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, the co-editors of Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks research integrity and first reported the BioMed Central retractions, have counted a total of 170 retractions in the past few years across several journals because of fake peer reviews.
